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A subjective comparison of Germany and the United States (a_subjective_comparision_of_germany_and_usa.doc)

http://www-math.uni-paderborn.de/~axel/us-d.html#customs

A subjective comparison of Germany and the United States

I grew up in Germany, lived there for 26 years, then moved to the United States in 1992. First I was a graduate student and now I work as a college teacher.

There are many stereotypes in Germany about life in the United States. Here I will try to compare these stereotypes to the reality in the US as I perceive it. In this comparison, I will also portrait the situation in Germany so that Americans might learn something about my country and Germans have something to criticize.

Of course, this comparison is necessarily subjective - take it as just another data point.

I am constantly generalizing here; I'm talking about "the Americans" and about "the Germans" and I'm aware of the fact that, strictly speaking, these generalizations are wrong; I'm trying to capture a hypothetical average. And not even that: just the average of my personal acquaintances mixed with some information gathered from news media (mainly The New York Times and Süddeutsche Zeitung, the best newspapers in their respective countries in my view). The first observation is that, in most instances, the US show a much larger variation than Germany does, so that talking about the "average" is more dangerous when referring to the US than when referring to Germany.

Since I started this page several years ago, I repeatedly noticed that the differences between America and Germany are getting smaller, a result of Germany moving in America's direction.

Democracy

There are many differences between the two countries in their approach to democracy. Most importantly, the US uses the majority system throughout, meaning that voters get to decide between several candidates, and a candidate needs more than 50% of the votes in order to win. Germany uses a mixture of proportional and majority systems in order to ensure that the proportion of parliament seats a party receives is exactly the same as the proportion of voters favoring that party (if that proportion is bigger than 5%) while also allowing for local representation.

The German system gives more power to the parties, since they can decide which candidates to place on the list from which the parliamentarians will later be drawn. Parties finance the election campaigns; the candidates themselves do not need to raise substantial amounts of money. In return, there is a very high party loyalty in the German parliament. Parliamentarians vote their conscience only on rare, very important questions; most of the time, they vote the party line. Parties are financed by the taxpayers according to the proportion of votes they received, by donations from big business, and by membership dues.

By contrast, Congress persons in the US are much more independent: they raise campaign money on their own (or use their own money) and the party cannot even decide who will be their candidate in a particular race: this is decided in so-called primaries, races between the various candidates where every voter who declares themselves a supporter of the party gets to vote. Once in Congress, the legislators can vote their conscience on virtually every question.

American politicians are almost constantly raising money for their next campaign. Since they are free to change their voting pattern on almost any topic, moneyed interests have much more political influence than in Germany.

A little-known and blatantly unjust feature of the US system is "redistricting", also called "gerrymandering". The country is divided into congressional districts, one for each member of the House of Parliament. The person who wins the most votes in a district gets the corresponding seat in the House. Every 10 years a census is carried out, and then the state governments go to work and redraw the congressional districts, purportedly to make them all the same size. The real reason is of course to keep the other party out of Congress: the census provides enough information to know where supporters of the other party live, and the new district boundaries are drawn so as to segregate all of them in as few districts as possible. This same game takes place every ten years, and it seems to outrage no one but me.

It is often believed that the position of President in the US is an extremely powerful one; this is wrong. Essentially all he can do is govern by changing administrative rules and veto or sign laws written by Congress, where the majority is often hostile to the president. Presidential vetoes can even be overridden by a 2/3-supermajority in both houses. By contrast, the Chancellor in Germany is elected by the parliament, the Bundestag, which means that a majority is behind him and most every law he wants to enact will pass, because of the above mentioned party discipline. Most laws, the ones not affecting the German states, do not have to be approved by the second chamber, the Bundesrat. (The precise rules about which laws have to be approved by the Bundesrat are quite obscure, and nobody seems to know them.)

The American parties are located to the right of their German counterparts. Former President Clinton for instance, a Democrat, would have to be placed at the right wing of the German conservative party CDU. Some people at the right end of the American Republican party are so extreme that they would probably be under surveillance in Germany. There is no social democratic party to speak of in the US; it is the biggest and oldest party in Germany, and indeed all parties in Germany are social democratic to some extent.

Even though US politics are located to the right of German politics, there is a very real sense in which Germany is more conservative. New technologies and new ways of doing things are embraced much more enthusiastically in the US. Even conservatives will often propose quite radical policy changes, such as throwing out the whole income tax system and replacing it with a national sales tax. On a whim, some states will introduce gay marriage and others will put a prohibition against it into the state constitution. Things appear to move much slower in Germany.

It is not very well known in Germany that most US states have systems of direct democracy, where citizens can bring up ballot measures if they raise enough signatures. There are no restrictions on the contents of these measures: tax reductions, criminal laws, recalls of unpopular politicians and changes of (state) constitutions are all fair game. Local prosecutors, sheriffs, and judges are also often directly elected by the citizenry. In Germany, these are all appointed, not elected.

Despite of this, large segments of American society ignore the political process altogether. Even the big presidential elections see fewer than 50% of the eligible voters participating; other elections have much smaller participation. In Germany, the numbers for federal elections are around 80%.

I can see three possible reasons for the low voter participation in the US: votes always take place on regular working days making it difficult to participate (even though many businesses grant time off for voting), the majority system locks out supporters of smaller parties, and the system of voter registration (which requires every voter who moved since the last election to fill out a form several weeks before the vote) makes it unnecessarily difficult to vote.

Freedom vs. Security

The term "freedom" is ubiquitous in the political and public debate of the US; it is indeed a very important, if ill-defined, concept for ordinary Americans. The quotation "Whoever is willing to give up essential freedoms in order to gain some temporary security deserves neither" is repeated over and over again; I'm sure that there is at least one usenet article circulating at any given time which contains this sentence.

By contrast, Germans like their security quite a bit and are uncomfortable with the dichotomy Freedom vs. Security. They want both. In fact, when told that in the US one can be fired when getting severely ill (or for no reason at all -- so-called "at will" employees), at which point the health insurance coverage is also lost, Germans ask puzzledly "But how can people live like that?" It is even more astounding to Germans, including me, that given this dire situation, US citizens are notorious for not saving any money, even living on credit instead. (Almost all Americans carry several credit cards; I never understood why anyone would bother to carry more than one until a fellow graduate student told me that she treats credit cards as a kind of unemployment insurance). Even in the presence of the huge German welfare system which tries to make everyone feel as secure as possible, people routinely save money, just to be on the safe side. Personally, I found it very strange to learn that many Americans, even those with a good income, live on a "month-to-month" basis, always waiting for the next paycheck to arrive in order to be able to pay the bills. If they do save, then they usually use the money to speculate (they call it "invest") in the stock market, which is again much too insecure for the average German. On a similar note, Germans don't understand why people keep living in areas which regularly see earthquakes or hurricanes; natural disasters which kill people don't exist in Germany. Many of this may be explained by a generally much higher level of optimism and risk tolerance in America.

The following interchange took place on usenet between a Dutch and an American; it beautifully sums up the differing approaches towards the concept of freedom:
- "A welfare system increases individual freedom, because it lets people experiment without the threat of catastrophic failure."
- "You are not really free if you are not free to fail."

It is rather surprising however that given this German emphasis on security, I cannot find a clear overall plus in freedom in the US. Sure enough, political freedoms and freedom of speech are stronger; racist Nazi propaganda for example is illegal in Germany while it is legal in the US. These prohibitions enjoy wide support in Germany, while the public in the US normally takes the view "I disagree with what you say, but I would fight for your right to say it." Most Germans are not able to take this noble position, probably because they fear the power of effective propaganda given the historical experiences. Publishing on the Internet is also less restricted in the US; in Germany, every commercial site needs to state the responsible person's true name, and pornographic materials have to be protected from access by children.

Everyday freedom of speech may very well be lower in the US however: it is severely restricted by the fact that one can be privately sued by anyone at any time for virtually anything, and being sued as a private individual is almost equivalent to bankruptcy, no matter whether the case is won or lost. (Unlike in Germany, the loser of a lawsuit in the US does not normally have to pay the winner's legal costs.) People who have spoken up against projects of certain corporations during town meetings have been sued by those same corporations, for the very act of speaking up (known as "SLAPP" lawsuits). Expressing a negative opinion about an American company's products on a website often results in a threatening letter from a lawyer. The right to freedom of speech also does not apply to the homeless: the US Supreme Court has recently ruled that local laws that prohibit asking people for money are constitutional. Ironically, the same Supreme Court ruled that giving money to politicians is covered by the freedom-of-speech clause and cannot be restricted.

In addition, the fact that one can legally be fired without any reason severely limits freedom of speech at the workplace. Typically, people are fired at a moment's notice and have to go home immediately. (Sure enough, given Germans' love for security, Germans can be fired only given a valid reason and normally only with several months notice; there is a whole branch of the juridical system, the Arbeitsgerichte, that deals with deciding which reasons are to be considered "valid".) If a member of one's family is chronically ill, the freedom to switch employment is severely limited in the US, because the new employer's health policy is legally allowed to reject the applicant. (Nevertheless, Americans switch jobs much more often than Germans.)

According to the Patriot Act, the FBI can get access to people's library borrowing and bookstore purchasing records, after having acquired a court order alleging spying or terrorist activities. These court orders cannot be challenged; librarians and bookstore employees who receive such an order must comply and may not talk about it to anyone. They are not allowed to openly protest, to write a letter to the editor, or to talk to their spouse about it.

It is an almost bizarre contradiction that US citizens are not granted the right to freely travel wherever they want. Cuba, a popular vacation spot for Europeans and Canadians, is off-limits to Americans. (Technically, they are allowed to travel there, but they may not buy any goods or services from Cubans, as part of the economic sanctions). This is especially ironic since one major complaint against communist countries has traditionally been their refusal to allow their citizenry to travel freely. I would expect that, were the German government to restrict the right to travel, major protests would ensue.

The fact that local communities, states and the federal government can enact concurrent criminal laws in the US together with often extremely draconian punishments (combined with sporadic enforcement) also tend to limit personal freedoms. (In Germany, only the federal government enacts criminal laws.)

Prostitution, anal sex, and zoophily are not illegal in Germany but are illegal in many US states (prohibitions against anal sex were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003 however). In Germany, all murderers can be and often are paroled after 15 years in prison (except for terrorists and the psychologically abnormal), while in the US they are lucky if they can get away with a life sentence without the possibility of parole (a sentence considered to be violating human dignity and therefore unconstitutional by the German high court, the Verfassungsgericht). In the US, children as young as 12 can be tried as adults and sentenced to life imprisonment in adult facilities, and 16 year olds can and are sentenced to death (this practice was finally stopped by the Supreme Court in 2005). In Germany, children under 14 cannot be punished at all, and juveniles under 18 cannot be sentenced as adults. People under 21 can be treated as juveniles if the court finds them to be immature.

Several large US cities have enacted curfew rules, which prohibit teenagers from being on the streets at night if not accompanied by an adult. This is another example of an infringement on freedoms which I think would not be tolerated in Germany. In general, teenagers seem to live much freer lives in Germany than in the US. For example, it is common for 15 or 16 year old Germans to take vacations in foreign countries with a couple of friends; in the US, it is rare to see anybody travelling under the age of 18 -- even though 16 year olds are already allowed to drive there, while in Germany the driving age is 18. It is much easier for German teenagers to drink and smoke, but other drugs are more readily available in the States. Many US high schools subject students who participate in extracurricular activities to random drug test, which also involve tests for alcohol and tobacco. Their freedom of expression is also limited: often they cannot criticize school officials or wear offensive or suggestive clothing. Some high schools forbid their students to hug or even touch other students. More than twenty states still allow the striking of students in schools if the parents don't object. Young German teenagers often spend their weekend nights dancing in discos, while virtually all comparable clubs in the states are off limits most of the time to people under the age of 21, because they serve alcohol. German adolescents over the age of 14 in Hamburg and Berlin may freely choose where to live (even on the streets if they want); in the US you are subject to your parents' will up to age 18.

The degree of economic freedom is higher in the US, mainly because of the lower level of regulation. In the US, if you have an idea for a new business, you have to convince a specialized high-risk investment fond ("venture capitalists") to invest in your enterprise in return for a share of the business and the profits; in Germany, you have to convince a bank to provide an unsecured loan, which is much harder.

In the US, you cannot leave your children at home alone if they are under 12 (varies by state). No such rules exist in Germany. On the other hand, several regulations in Germany limit personal everyday freedoms:

you cannot shop or open your shop at night or on weekends; (the Sunday prohibition is justified with vague Christian rules and with the supposed need to keep a day for the family -- brothels are of course open on Sundays)
freight trucks cannot be driven on weekends
men have to do at least one year of mandatory military or social service
your current address has to be registered with the authorities at all times, even if you are a German living outside of Germany (while Americans are often outraged by this requirement, every American with a driver's license, and that means everyone, has to register a current address with authorities; furthermore, driver's license information is sold to private businesses, something completely out of the question in Germany)
police can and often do ask for your name and address, especially if you look foreign; if you don't carry ID, they are allowed to take you to the station
you must take classes and obtain a license in order to be allowed to fish or hunt
you cannot create noise by cutting grass on Sundays
you cannot wear a mask when participating in a demonstration (the ''Vermummungsverbot''; police want to be able to identify you on their video tapes)

All these must sound pretty incredible to the average American I'm sure.

I see one amusing parallel though: both countries hold dear one "freedom" which virtually no one else in the world recognizes as one: the right to drive as fast as possible on the Autobahn and the right to keep and bear firearms. Both these "freedoms" survive because there are very effective and vocal lobby groups behind them, even though a slight majority of the general populations in both countries oppose them.

Nationalism

Or maybe it should be more benignly called "patriotism"; in any event, it is ubiquitous in the US: flags, the anthem, "pledge of allegiance" every morning in every grade school, politicians regularly praising "the greatest nation on earth" etc. This is nauseating to the average German, but it is also rather difficult to understand given the widespread hatred for the government and its institutions in the US. Apparently, the nation is seen to be a completely separate entity from the nation's institutions. Atrocities committed by the army in the various wars, crimes committed all over the world by the CIA, and the huge social problems of the country are openly discussed and part of the public consciousness, but all of this does not seem to have much of an impact on the American's love for their nation. When asked directly, they usually explain that they love the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence and in the constitution, most of all the commitment to freedom. The economic system of free entrepreneurship is also often an object of love.

The situation in Germany, of course, is radically different. To love Germany is to love its history, its culture, its political and economical system, the government's institutions, the whole enchilada. Obviously, Germany's history cannot be loved, and so it is a pretty safe bet that someone wearing a shirt with a German flag on it is either a soldier or a foreigner or a neo-Nazi. At best, it is considered to be in bad taste to claim that one is proud to be a German.

The jobless youth in big German cities and in the eastern part of the country however often present an aggressive nationalistic attitude, to the extent of harassing, beating and even killing foreigners with the wrong skin colour. This kind of violence is unheard of in the US.

There is also a kind of snobbishness in Germany's educated classes about the myopia of Americans: "they don't care what's going on in the world, they don't travel abroad, they still don't understand why they are hated around the world, they think they are always right etc." While all of this may be partially true, it conveniently ignores the very noble and enlightened treatment that Japan and West Germany received after the Second World War, and the fact that the US was the driving force behind the creation of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Technology

It is well known that the US is the most heavily technologized society; if you count TVs, phones, microwaves, pagers, cars or personal computers per person, you'll find that the numbers are far higher than in Germany, or most every other country for that matter. Clearly, they are also world leaders in many technologies, such as military applications, space exploration, biotech, software and computer chips.

Americans generally embrace new technologies enthusiastically; it's cool just because it's new. By contrast, Germans are much more reluctant and don't try out new stuff without given a very good reason to do so. Sometimes new technology is even made fun of: If a German sees someone with a cellular phone, they often assume that that person probably has a need to look important (this has changed in the last couple of years however). If a cellular phone or beeper goes off in a cinema, concert or restaurant, Germans can get pretty angry. While every kitchen, office and cafeteria in the US is now equipped with a microwave oven, people in Germany are still debating whether microwaved foods are good for you and whether microwaves may have detrimental effects on people with pacemakers. Almost everyone in the US has a computer at home; many Germans didn't see the need until just recently. New (and not so new) technologies are usually a lot more expensive in Germany than in the US, average income in Germany is lower, and Germans tend to stick to their money more.

Some of this may be attributed to the generally higher level of optimism in America. If you present a new idea, people will usually respond with "Sounds great!", while the typical German reply is "This won't work because..."

This is not the full story however. I am constantly amazed by the poor quality and backwardedness of many technologies routinely employed in the US. Sometimes I think that while Germans tend to tolerate outrageous prices without complaint, Americans tolerate substandard quality. Here are some examples, I keep discovering more every day:

Cellular phones in the US have operated for a very long time using an ancient analog protocol, while pretty much all other countries in the world adopted digital standards several years earlier. To get complete nationwide coverage, it is still necessary to use analog in the US, and it's trivial to listen in on these cellular conversations since they are not scrambled in any way (there is a whole underground scene of eavesdroppers who exchange tapes of the juiciest conversations they were able to capture), and it's also easy to place cellular calls on someone else's bill.
The banking system is archaic. It appears as if banks are not electronically connected at all (even though they are). It is not possible to instruct your bank to pay your rent every month directly into the landlord's account (the usual method in Germany). Every month, you have to write out a check, send it physically to your landlord, who carries it physically to his bank, which sends it physically back to your bank in order to get the money. Banks tell you to keep your account number secret, but it is openly printed on every check, along with your name and address. Some banks now offer "bill paying services"; this only means that *they* will mail the check to your landlord instead. Another new system, heralded as a huge achievement, is "Direct Deposit" or "Automatic Payment". It allows to make regular payments such as salary, insurance or utility payments directly without checks. It does not work between private accounts and it takes about 2 months to set up. (In Germany, it takes no time to set up a plan like that; you instruct your bank and then it works.)
Many US banks now offer "Internet banking" and claim to be on the technological forefront. All you can do with these services is move money from your checking account into a savings or investment account, check your balance and find out which checks have cleared. Almost all these site use a completely insecure static user/password login scheme; virtually all internet banks in Europe use one-time passwords or cryptographic challenge-response systems.
Merchants in the US accept checks, which of course can be trivially abused; German merchants only accept secured checks.
You will actually see Americans write out checks at super market checkout counters, and many people set aside an afternoon every month for "balancing their checkbook" and "paying the bills", two activities that nobody has even heard of in Germany.
In Germany, checks are not used to pay bills. You simply instruct your bank to transfer the money into the payee's account on a regular basis, or give permission to the payee to suck the money out of your account.
US ATM cards work in German ATM machines while US ATM machines could not accept German cards until recently. However: the US ATM system is much more secure since the PIN is checked online with the issuing bank; German ATM cards used to encode the PIN on the card with a globally valid key so that offline operation of ATMs were possible.
Digital ISDN telephone lines have been available to every German household for many years. In the US, service started much later, some local telephone companies still don't offer them, and it's generally poorly supported where available. Far from being a well-defined standard, ISDN in North America consists of a zoo of slightly incompatible protocol variations. The analog phone system still uses tone dialing which for a long time made it possible to dial for free from every public phone with a $2 phone dialer. Plans for such dialers were readily available on the Internet.
Online services and network computers: "Bildschirmtext" in Germany and "Minitel" in France have been accessible by everyone since the eighties. Both use dial-up telephone connections to browse material on central servers and allow individuals to publish material on these servers. Bildschirmtext displays the pages on the TV (optionally on a PC) while Minitel uses a proprietary little terminal with keyboard, something that would be called "network computer" these days. Bildschirmtext was never a big success because of the high connection fees and the start up costs for the device; Minitel was a winner because the terminals were given away for free to everyone. Services of comparable quality and breadth have come into existence in the US much later.
Videotext, a free text based information system (news, weather, stock prices, sport results, TV schedules) broadcast along with the TV signal, is common in Europe and doesn't exist in the US.
Telephone lines and electricity lines in US cities are still very often overhead, which is cheap, ugly and makes them vulnerable to storms. Here in Minneapolis, there's a power outage at least once a month. In Germany, almost everything is under the ground now and power outages are very rare.
The U.S. telephone number system is idiotic: all area codes are three digits long, while all phone numbers are 7 digits long. So obviously, large cities need several area codes. All these area codes count as local calls however, and local calls are dialed differently from long-distance calls. So you need to know at all times which area codes belong to your local area; when moving around in a city, you have to be aware of the area code you're currently in. And all this information keeps changing over time: when a city grows, they simply add new area codes. In Germany, every city has a single area code. Large cities have short area codes, small cities have long area codes. In small cities, the phone numbers are short, in large cities they're long. Solves all problems.
If you order cable TV in the US, you often get a strange "set top box" that comes with its own remote control and has to be installed between cable outlet and TV. Some of these systems even make it impossible to watch one channel and record another one at the same time. In Germany, you just hook up your TV/VCR to the outlet.
Many shower heads are held at a fixed height that cannot be changed, even in hotel rooms. I don't think I have ever seen that in Germany.
Cars. Enough said.
Many extension cords still come without a third hole for grounding.
Trains. There is a single daily train connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. There are about 17 daily connections between Hamburg and Munich (roughly the same distance).
Washing machines. The average German housewife commands a washing machine that far surpasses the top-of-the-line model in US laundry shops. The common opening-at-the-top US model which is really not much more than a rotating cylinder represents the technological achievement of the German sixties. (To be fair: American dryers are better, bigger and stronger than German ones.)
Many American cookers arrange the controls in a brain-dead way behind the hotplates, so that one constantly has to reach over the boiling foods. In Germany, the controls are at the front side where they obviously belong.
The quality of the plastic bags you get in super markets is incredibly poor, so much so that they often give you a double plastic bag with a paper bag inside.
Many houses in the US, even here in Minneapolis where temperatures reach negative 40 degrees in winter, still have windows with wooden frames that are opened and closed simply by sliding up and down. These offer only minimal insulation. Germans know these windows only from old American movies. The majority of new American homes are built with a wooden frame and little insulation in a couple of weeks. German homes are made from brick, have a basement and very good insulation.
Sidewalks are very sloppily constructed in the US. They are often made from huge square concrete plates, and these move up and down to form lakes when it rains, often break, look ugly etc.
The US is the last country in the world which still clings to the archaic Imperial system of units (inches, yards, miles, gallons, pounds). Most Americans don't know how many inches there are in a yard, how many yards in a mile, how many pounds in a ton etc. (They are completely arbitrary numbers.) NASA lost a $750 million Mars explorer spacecraft in 1999 because they forgot to convert between Imperial and metric units.

Some examples of areas where I think everyday technology is ahead in the US:

High speed Internet connections, in the form of ADSL and cable modem lines, arrived about 15 months earlier in the US than in Germany. The huge Internet acceptance advantage that the US enjoys over Germany is due to one thing alone: flat rate pricing for telephone and Internet connections; a 24 hour 56Kbps connection in the US cost $20 a month, a 24 hour 400Kbps cable or ADSL connection cost $50, with the latter mostly available in urban areas only. (These internet price differences between the two countries have largely vanished in the last couple of years.)
Air conditioning is almost unheard of in Germany. Most Germans frown upon the idea as an unnecessary waste of energy.
Vending machines generally accept coins and bills and give exact change; vending machines in Germany (which are much rarer than in the US) often only take coins and don't give change (though I hear this has changed recently).
High tech and critical medical care such as heart bypasses or cancer treatments seem to me to be more advanced in the US and hospitals are better equipped.

Television and the Media

It's a common stereotype that American TV is unbelievably bad. And for the most part, it is. You don't get any international news, instead you see hyped up national and local news, invariably stressing violent or freak or feel-good incidents; politics is always presented in a black and white, emotional, and incredibly simplifying manner, then you have UFOs and "Unsolved Mysteries", and of course a fair amount of daytime talk shows with transgender prostitutes who recently had plastic surgery and are now sleeping with their sons, or whatever. This whole disaster is thankfully interrupted by screaming commercials every couple of minutes. I can't stomach it for longer than half an hour.

In Germany, the biggest TV stations are "Anstalten öffentlichen Rechts", which means that they cannot make profit, they are independent in the sense that politicians cannot directly influence their decisions, and the top managers are appointed by councils that represent the major groups in society: political parties, unions, churches, business etc. Laws prescribe their internal organization and their purpose. They are financed from a monthly fee that every owner of a radio or TV set has to pay and from advertising money. Advertising is restricted to certain times of the day and never interrupts movies or news shows. News coverage is usually very broad, internationally oriented and well-balanced with few freak coverage (then again, I believe that many more freak incidents happen in the US than in Germany, for some reason. Have you ever seen a living room being washed away by the rain or 50 houses burning down in Germany? Happens all the time here.)

Then there are also private TV stations in Germany, mostly on cable. They definitely move in the direction of US TV, not quite reaching it yet though.

Again, there's another side to the story, which is not well-known outside of the US, maybe not even inside. It is public TV and radio. Financed mostly by donations and partly by the government (few ads), it provides exceptionally high quality programming, much better than anything I've seen on German public TV. For example, I saw an 8 hour documentary about the war against the native Americans, stretching out over four days, and a similar one about the civil rights movement. (Documentaries in German TV are usually 60, at most 90 minutes long.) The news coverage on public TV and national public radio approaches the quality of German news, except for international coverage. Science coverage is clearly superior in US public media. I personally enjoy the public media in the US more than the ones in Germany, mostly because of the in-depth coverage of a vast variety of topics.

Bureaucracy

There are several strange things to be said about US bureaucracies: they are extremely user-friendly, amazingly inefficient, and universally hated.

When filling out your tax form, you can always call a toll-free telephone number and friendly people will help you or send you easy-to-understand instructions. The tax forms are very easy to fill out, and at the end you know exactly how much taxes you owe. You can even file your whole taxes over the phone. Compare that to complicated Byzantine tax forms in Germany which are much longer than those in the US. The instructions for the German forms are nearly incomprehensible since they use their own lawyer speak. Once you have filled out everything, you send it in, someone checks it all and computes your actual tax load which you only learn much later. On the side: by German standards, taxes in the US, at least for medium incomes and above, are laughably low, which makes the constant American complaining about high taxes seem rather funny to me. (Two caveats: stock market gains are taxed in the US and are not taxed in Germany; US citizens living abroad have to file annual tax returns about their worldwide income while Germans only report their German income.)

Other bureaucracies are also generally friendlier in the US than in Germany. German bureaucrats tend to see their customers as a nuisance and treat them accordingly, while US bureaucracies work more like customer serving businesses. This could however also simply be a consequence of the generally higher level of friendliness in the US which I'll talk more about in the Violence and Aggression section.

German bureaucracies never bend the rules and have opening hours that all but exclude working people.

Given my good old German bureaucratic mind-set, the boundless ineffectiveness of US bureaucracies bothers me a lot. For example, the US is not able to enforce child payments of divorced fathers. As a father, you just move away, preferably to a different state, and there's a very good chance that you'll never have to pay. The mother would have to hire private investigators and lawyers in order to track you down and make you pay, but of course she doesn't have the money for that. Since the bureaucracy is of no help, there actually exist private companies who promise to make the deadbeat father pay, for a heavy percentage. In Germany, child payments are simply taken out of the father's paycheck, end of story. If there are problems collecting, then the collecting bureaucracy loses money, not the mother, because she receives the money from that agency in either case.

Another example is the fact that the US has no effective way of forcing someone to pay an outstanding bill or to make a credit payment. In fact, I remember seeing a sign at the student loan office at my university which said "No defaulting allowed". This strikes Germans as very funny: the word `defaulting' does not even have a translation, because the concept is virtually non-existent in Germany; it is simply impossible to default - if you don't pay, you will be reminded a couple of times and then someone from the court will come and take away your belongings. If you don't own enough, they'll put a hold on part of your future earnings. By contrast, in the US there's a whole industry of private "collection agencies" which don't have any executive power and can't do much more than harass debtors without end. Even the payment of traffic tickets or other legal penalties is not enforced: In Santa Barbara, the city government takes out a page in the local newspaper every couple of months and lists everyone by name who failed to pay their ticket. Nothing else happens to them, unless they are stopped for another traffic violation. Amazing.

A more bothering instance of US inefficiency is the apparent inability to ensure full immunization of children. The immunization level in the US is now lower than that in some developing countries.

And one last example: in Germany, it is impossible to have a car with a valid license plate and not carry car insurance. If you apply for a license plate, you have to present proof of insurance; if you drop your insurance, your name is forwarded from the insurance company to the appropriate agency, which will invalidate your license plate. Non-valid license plates are easy to spot from far away. This simple system makes sure that everyone who drives carries car insurance. The US bureaucracies are apparently not able to create a similar system. Accidents with uninsured drivers are a major problem here. It goes so far that insurance companies sell special insurance policies covering the case that you are victim of an accident and the guilty party does not carry insurance and cannot pay.

Communism and Socialism

One would assume that anti-communism is much more prevalent in the US than in Germany. After all, the whole German model of a social market economy is heavily influenced by Marxist ideas. It is essentially an attempt to avoid the dire consequences of capitalism that Marx predicted.

The high cost associated with the extensive social system is often cited as a reason for the relative stagnancy and high unemployment rate in German society and as an argument for the US free market model. There is some truth to that; however, the tremendous costs of the American "social system" are often overlooked: the money spent on housing a gigantic prison population consisting of jobless, hopeless or mentally ill inmates. The system cannot cope with all the inmates anymore and some states have even started to hire private companies to run prisons.

The US defined itself over a long time as Marxism's big enemy; in everyday political (usenet) discussions, it is still common to be accused of Marxism if one favours proposals such as tax increases or public health insurance. This accusation is very effective, because no defence is possible. The term "social democrat" does not exist in the US public debate, so everything slightly critical of limitless capitalism is defined as socialism, and this term in turn is used synonymously with communism and Marxism.

It is interesting to note that in Germany only people critical of capitalism use the term "capitalism", while in the US only people critical of socialism use the term "socialism".

Then there was Senator McCarthy who, together with his Congress committee in the fifties, saw communists everywhere and came up with elaborate blacklists and other means to get rid of them. At that time, being accused of communism could amount to a personal catastrophe.

It is not very well known however that Germany saw a much more vigilant communism hunt at about the same time. While in the US only about a dozen people ever went to prison for being Communists, that same number runs in the thousands in Germany. The communist party was forbidden by the German high court, and the party members who continued their activities were arrested and sent to prison.

Unions

Clearly, unions are much more powerful in Germany than in the US. They are huge, and they don't bother to bargain with individual employers: they talk directly to the employer's associations in the different fields. For instance, there is a single union representing everyone working with metal, and if this union decides to call for a general strike, a substantial part of the German economy stands still. If they win a regional contract, it will usually be adopted nation wide and will then apply to all employers in the field alike. Several large unions have recently merged in order to increase their power. It's virtually impossible to work in Germany and not have a union negotiated contract. There does not exist a minimum wage law, and there is no need for one. Only recently have some employers (mainly in Eastern Germany) tried to leave the employer's associations in order to avoid being bound by these contracts.

By contrast, American unions in most fields are weak and splintered (with some notable exceptions: police, construction, airline pilots, automobile industry, teachers). Often, different unions fight against each other. The historic alliance between unions and the mob is the most likely cause for the low moral authority attributed to US unions. This allows American employers to openly state their goal of keeping unions out of their business. A statement like that would create a huge outcry in German public debate, and it would not go unpunished. US unions are often hostile towards strike breakers and force all employees of a unionized company to join the union. This is not the case in Germany: if you don't want to join, you don't; you will still get the benefits of the negotiated contract. German unions often see themselves (and are sometimes seen) as working for the public good, for example when they try to come up with programs against joblessness; American unions are much more focused on their member's narrow interests. Here is an appalling example of this: the union of Californian prison guards actively lobbies for longer prison sentences. Another instance of this is that American police unions usually come out on the side of the officer in police-abuse cases, while the German police union typically sides with the abused party.

The whole bargaining process appears much more civilized in Germany. When the contract runs out, the parties meet, they can't agree at first, there's a strike which usually is only symbolical, and then a new contract is written up. Everybody pretty much agrees that this is a good process. In the US, individualism is so deeply rooted in the public mind that many people outright deny the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively (no one denies the right of capitalists to organize in huge corporations though...). Labour fights are often ugly and war-like and go on for a long time: employers hire replacement workers right away, they try to fire union organizers and other strikers (which is illegal in the US, as it is in Germany), strikers try to keep the replacement workers out etc. To a German, it looks a lot like the Manchester capitalism that seemed to have been overcome a long time ago.

Management of airlines in the US have figured out that by filing for bankruptcy, they can get out of their contracts with unionized pilots and mechanics, and can shed expensive pension plans at the same time. All American airlines have now filed for bankruptcy. There is no public outcry whatsoever.

The management of US corporations is generally seen to be responsible only to shareholders. In Germany, management is seen to be responsible to shareholders and employees alike, even though this seems to be changing slowly in the American direction.

The World of Work

The common stereotype of the diligent hard working German and the laid back TV watching American is rather wrong. It is my experience that Americans are generally much more hard-working than Germans. For example, it is not uncommon to meet people who work two 40-hours-a-week jobs, or who work full time while also taking a full time course load at a college. Both are completely non-existent in Germany (there are rules against working too much, intended to protect workers; two full-time jobs are not allowed). Many Germans work only 35 hours a week, others 37.5, all take long vacations, and I estimate that over the whole year, the average German with a job works about two thirds the hours of the average working American.

In the US, it is also quite common that people who are not paid by the hour work much longer than the 40 hours per week that they are obliged to. In spite of the fact that many large and successful employers freely lay off workers to increase profits and appease Wall Street, employees in the US exhibit a rather strange loyalty to their employers. They often own stock of the very company they work for and really want "their" company to succeed, almost like a team sport. In Germany, where it is taboo for a successful company to lay off any workers, many workers are still not very loyal to their employer: basically, the employer is the enemy who forces you to come to work every day.

Even in their time off, Americans often volunteer for charities or at schools, join their children at sports games, or work out at a gym. In Germany, it seems to be much more common to relax by spending time in a pub or going for a walk. Americans watch a lot more TV though while Germans like to join various sports and hobby clubs, so maybe the time off is a tie.

While Americans definitely work more, they are very much focused on making money. By contrast, in Germany you have a work ethic where many people take pride in producing quality, which I think is sometimes absent in the US. However, I received a message from an American project manager who has lived in Germany for 9 years and claims that the pride in workmanship and the quality of work is decreasing rapidly.

In everyday life in the US, you often encounter shocking incompetence. This is a consequence of the fact that most jobs require only minimal training:

A police officer in the US for instance gets about 6 months of training at a police academy, while the same job in Germany is preceded by three year schooling and training period.
Bank employees in the US are often "trained on the job", while in Germany every bank teller goes through a three year apprenticeship.
Teachers in the US typically finish a four year college degree during which time they take some teaching classes and then they immediately get a teaching license; in Germany, every prospective teacher must study two fields plus pedagogy for about 5 years at a university, followed by the first state's exam, after which he or she receives another two years of intensive theoretical and practical training at a school, writes a thesis and has to pass the second state's exam.
Anybody in the US can open a car repair shop without any qualifications; in Germany, you first need a three year apprenticeship to become a car mechanic, then you need to work as car mechanic for three years, then study many months for the "Meisterprüfung", an exam which is the prerequisite for opening your own shop and employing others.

Customer service is far better in the US in virtually every respect. Some examples:

Every major business in the US has a toll-free telephone number.
Every product you buy can be returned even if opened, and you get your money back. In Germany, normally only defective products can be returned, and most of the time you can't get cash back.
Store opening hours and telephone line hours are much more consumer friendly in the US.

Germans acknowledge all these disadvantages, but often argue from the worker's standpoint and not from the consumer's perspective: "Who wants to answer phones at 1 a.m. anyway?" or "The salespeople shouldn't have to work on Sundays." The logic is that most people spend more time working than consuming, so it makes sense to skew the rules in favour of workers.

Legal System

The most conspicuous difference between the two legal systems is the use of juries in the US. Every defendant has the right to a jury trial. (They may opt for a trial without jury, but almost no one does. Interestingly, the situation in Japan is opposite: there no one chooses a jury trial.) Even civil cases are normally decided by juries. The appeals process doesn't use any juries though. In Germany, judges or panels of judges decide all cases. It is not well known in the US that in medium size cases, these German judges are assisted by two lay people ("Schöffen") whose votes count just as much as those of the judges. The lay people serve on a series of trials with the same judge, while in the US a jury serves only for one trial. The judge in the US has only procedural power and has no say in the outcome of the trial (in egregious cases they can overturn the jury's decision, however). Whereas in Germany the Schöffen consult closely with the judge and are informed about all relevant legal aspects of a case, in the US the jury typically receives rather short instructions asking them to answer a simple yes/no question. Schöffen have a say in sentencing while juries do not (except in capital punishment cases).

In Germany, both the prosecution and the defence may appeal an unfavourable outcome; in the US only the defence can appeal. The Supreme Court in the US appears to be more transparent than the German counterpart, the Bundesverfassungsgericht. The names, political affiliations, voting patterns and opinions of the individual judges, as well as dissenting opinions are common knowledge in the US, while the same information is generally not reported in German media.

Only a very small percentage of cases reach a jury trial in the US: most cases are resolved during "plea bargaining" between defence and prosecution, where the defendant basically offers to plead guilty to a lesser crime in return for a smaller sentence. The outcomes of jury trials are considered to be volatile and are avoided by both parties if possible. Often, as a condition of these bargains, the defendant has to give testimony and aid in the conviction of other criminals. In Germany, there is some resistance against deals of this sort ("Kronzeugenregelung"), and after having been used for several years in cases of organized crime, they were abandoned. The general feeling is that punishment should follow culpability and should not depend on the outcome of "dirty deals": defendants without important information don't deserve harsher punishment. Americans are typically very pragmatic: "Why not give him a break if it helps in catching another bad guy?"

The U.S. legal system is openly partisan and political. Typically, when a new president is elected and a administration comes in, all 93 U.S. Attorneys are fired and replaced by new ones belonging to the right party. The U.S. Attorneys are extremely powerful: they decide who is investigated and prosecuted on the federal level, they are the ones who oversee the plea bargaining process, and they are the ones who decide what charges to file and what appeals to pursue. In Germany, prosecutors have life-time positions not subject to political appointment.

The American system actively discourage confessions; if a suspect confesses, he or she will get the same punishment as if convicted by a jury. In Germany, a confession normally results in a much lower punishment.

The system of criminal laws in the US is much more Byzantine and complicated than that in Germany. The German criminal code is a little booklet which one can easily read and understand in one afternoon, while the criminal section of the U.S. code comprises several thick volumes. And this is only the federal level; the states and even the local jurisdictions in the US pile on their own layers of criminal codes. On top of all that there's the "common law" which is a rather ill defined body of rules that isn't written down anywhere and that is the result of prior court decisions sometimes going back to England several hundred years ago. Common law is mostly used in civil cases and its importance has been decreasing in recent years. In Germany, only the federal government issues a criminal and civil code and there is no common law layer.

The civil and criminal codes are more transparent in Germany; however, the rules and regulations that apply to businesses are issued and enforced by various different bureaucracies and are much more numerous and a lot harder to navigate than the American ones.

The US legal system (officially denies but) practices double jeopardy: you can be tried, sentenced, and punished twice for the same crime, first by the state and then by the federal system. This is mostly used in drug cases and is rather rare however. Drug law is strange in that state laws are usually relatively lenient when it comes to drug possession, while federal laws are extremely harsh; people who are caught can only hope and pray that the federal prosecutor won't be interested in their case. In Germany, possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use is normally not prosecuted. In the US, the government may also take away all property that was used to commit a crime, for example a farm where some marijuana was grown or a house in which drugs were found. Even if acquitted or never prosecuted in criminal court, the accused still has to fight in civil court for the return of their property.

As mentioned earlier, punishment is in general much harsher in the US than in Germany. But there is one very sinister aspect of the German system: Sicherheitsverwahrung, a concept going back to the Nazis. If a criminal has completed their sentence and a judge decides that they are still a grave danger to society, they can be kept locked up indefinitely. It is not used very often, however.

In the US, so called crime stopper programs are common: they provide a toll-free phone number to anonymously accuse anyone of a crime and they pay a reward if the call results in a conviction. Germans are generally appalled by this system since it reminds them of the Nazi scheme of having everybody spy on everybody else, and because it encourages false accusations in order to get back at somebody.

Police in the US commonly use lie detector tests to check the statements of suspects; the results of these tests are however not admissible in court unless all sides agree. In Germany, lie detectors are considered to be unreliable hocuspocus and are not used at all.

Parliamentarians in the U.S. are also called "lawmakers", and that's exactly what they are. The only way to distinguish yourself in parliament is to make a law and get it passed. One frequently gets the impression that laws are only introduced in order to make a public statement and to get news coverage. These laws are often written by the parliamentarians themselves (without much legal knowledge, because they usually don't have a law degree). The result is an amazing zoo of laws that don't fit together (and are often struck down by the courts). I have seen a specific medical procedure being outlawed in California by putting the ban into the state constitution in order to make the prohibition more difficult to change. Overall, the US legal situation is not very aesthetic: no overriding principles, just a huge collection of random prohibitions. Many regulations that are handled by German bureaucracies much more flexibly are written into law in the US because the lawmakers traditionally don't trust the administration.

In Germany, it is rare that individual parliamentarians introduce a new law. The common procedure is that larger groups of parliamentarians (from one party or being interested in one topic) work together, or that a minister's staff works out a law.

The American system of bail, which forces everyone arrested for a crime to pay money or go to jail, is considered to be blatantly partial to the rich by Germans. In Germany, bail is rarely used; defendants awaiting trial have to stay in prison if and only if they are considered dangerous or likely to flee.

Generally, police and prosecutors have more power in the US than in Germany. For instance, police are allowed to and regularly perform undercover operations in many areas, including posting officers in adult cinemas or saunas to watch out for "indecent conduct". Officers can also act as "agent provocateurs", for instance they can offer to sell drugs, pose as prostitutes, or pretend to be teens looking for sex in Internet chat rooms. Undercover policemen are also routinely used in large political demonstrations. In Germany, undercover operations are only used in severe cases of organized crime.

Privacy and Access to Information

Germany has extremely strict privacy laws: the supreme court has acknowledged a right to "informational self-determination" and everyone storing personal data about others has to obtain consent from these persons, has to allow them access to their records, and can use the data only for the purpose they were originally collected for. The federal government and all states have privacy ombudsmen who take citizen's complaints and make sure that the privacy laws are enforced and extended where appropriate. Germans value their privacy highly and essentially everybody agrees with these laws.

So do I, and it is absolutely frightening to me how privacy rights are constantly violated in the US. Credit card companies keep databases about your purchases and sell the information; supermarkets issue frequent-buyer cards in order to track your preferences; if you buy a TV set in an electronics store, they ask for your name and address; the post office sells information about who moved where; the Internet set-top box WebTV dials up Microsoft every night to upload information about your web surfing habits; automatic face recognition cameras are used in sports arenas and casinos; surveillance cameras are common in public city areas etc. etc.

The US has very strong access-to-information laws. If the government collected it, and it does not affect vital national interests, then you can file a request to see it. Emails of the president, phone bills of the governor, lists of all issued driver's licenses: everything is fair game. These laws enjoy wide public support.

Interestingly, neither is privacy a big issue in the US nor is access to information a topic in Germany. Clearly, the two issues are opposite ends of a spectrum - you can't have both at the same time. Maybe this difference between the countries is a symptom of the fact that Germans tend to distrust big business, while Americans tend to distrust big government. Quite predictably, the consequence is that corporations are more powerful and government is less powerful in the US than in Germany. When Americans need a quick example of government gone bad, German history serves well; when Germans need a quick example of corporate excesses, American businesses are often used.

In one area, the US approach is far superior to the German (or European) one. All information and data collected or produced by government research facilities is released into the public domain, without any copyright. Be it images from the Hubble space telescope, sequence from the human genome, satellite images of environmental degradation, or cancer statistics: in America they are all completely free to the public for any purpose whatsoever, including commercial purposes. European governments are much more protective and usually give out data like these only for non-profit research purposes under specific licenses, while retaining full copyright.

Educational System

The American system of high school education, where all students regardless of talent attend the same school for 12 years, has been tried in Germany as "Gesamtschulen". Conservatives are usually opposed to this model, calling it egalitarian and socialist. (It appears less socialist however if one takes into account that US schools are financed locally and hence poor communities generally have bad schools; the rich avoid the public school system altogether and send their kids to excellent private schools.) The traditional German public school system divides the students at age 10 into three groups. The pupils in the three groups go on to different schools, only one of which, the Gymnasium, leads to the Abitur, which is the sole entrance requirement for universities. It is possible to switch schools after age 10, but it is difficult and relatively rare. The division into three groups is supposed to be based on performance alone, but surprisingly often the parents' social status plays a role. Private schools are almost irrelevant in Germany.

US pupils get a lot more vacation: 13 weeks during the summer, plus one week for Christmas and one week of Spring Break. German pupils get 6 weeks during the summer, 2 weeks in the fall, 2 weeks for Christmas, and 2 weeks Spring Break. On the other hand, German school is usually over at 1pm, while US school lasts till 3 or 4 pm.

While teaching in the US is considered to be just another "job", teachers in Germany are highly regarded professionals. The training required before you can become a German teacher is much longer than that for US public schools.

In the U.S., parents may elect to school their children at home; this is sometimes done by religious conservatives who don't agree with evolution or sex education being taught to their kids. In Germany, home schooling is not allowed.

The system of early childhood education is much more comprehensive in the U.S. than in Germany. Kindergardens are not free in Germany, and there are not enough places for all kids. By contrast, the U.S. has a universal and free "Head Start" program targeted at disadvantaged kids. On the other hand, American women often work until several days before giving birth, and start to work again a couple of days later; there is no financial support for parents, except for tax breaks. In Germany women are not allowed to work from 6 weeks before until 8 weeks after giving birth and receive their full salary during this time; after that the mother or father can take one year off, receiving 66% of their net pay and a job guarantee. Parents also receive $200 Kindergeld per child and month, until the child is 18 and often longer.

The German public (including me) generally assumed that the German school system is far superior to the US one -- until the devastating results of the PISA 2000 study came out. It showed that the knowledge and skills of German students were consistently below the performance of US students (which typically hovered around the international average). Since then, more German parents have begun to send their children to private schools, which had performed better than public schools in the study. (Some Germans have criticized the PISA study, claiming that students were told that the results didn't affect their grades and they were free to leave once finished with the test.)

When I arrived in the United States, I believed that all universities there were private, that professors could be fired if they didn't work hard enough, and that in any case only the rich or the exceptionally smart could go to college due to the high tuitions. Wrong on all counts.

Many states maintain public universities supported by taxpayer's money, and these have very low tuition for residents of the state. In addition, virtually all universities, public and private, are heavily subsidized by grants from the federal government. All private universities are non-profit institutions and scholarships are given freely. Professors earn tenure after having been employed and shown a good record for a couple of years. Their jobs are then virtually guaranteed just as in the German system. The tenure system exists at public and at private universities alike. (In Germany, all but one university are public.) Surprisingly, public universities and schools pay significantly higher salaries than private ones.

In general, the German system places much more emphasis on big examinations while degrees in the US are automatically granted if the student has passed a sufficient number of classes. This is true both for the high school diploma, which doesn't involve any exam in the US and consists of several big written and oral exams in Germany, as well as for college degrees, which in Germany require passing several oral exams and producing a thesis.

It turns out that professors in the US are a lot freer than their German colleagues: for about four months of the year, they can do what they want, without any obligations of presence whatsoever. While Germany also has long semester vacations, professors still have to report to work every day (except for their regular vacation time). On the other hand, German professors usually have personal secretaries and academic assistants, which most US professors lack. Professors in Germany are very highly regarded in the public opinion and accordingly full of themselves.

If you go to a college town in the US, you will see students studying in libraries, coffee shops, book stores etc. In Germany, it's rare to find students studying in public.

It is very interesting to compare the accessibility of academia in the two countries. On the face of it, Germany wins hands down. Attending a university is free and (except for overrun fields such as medicine or psychology) prospective students don't have to apply anywhere: they simply sign up at their school of choice and start studying, provided they have the Abitur. On top of that, the German government pays a fellowship to every student without affluent parents. Only one half of this grant is paid out as a loan and has to be paid back later.

It is not very well known that a much larger proportion of the population attends college in the US than in Germany. Almost one half of all Americans acquire a college degree during their lifetime, compared to only one third of Germans. (University degrees in Germany are worth more than US college degrees however; an American B.S. is roughly equivalent in knowledge to a German Vordiplom while a German Diplom, which takes 5-7 years to get, roughly corresponds to a Master's degree. Much of the material of German Gymnasiums is taught in the "liberal education" part of the first two years of American colleges.) Families in the US start saving money early on in order to be able to afford the college education of their kids later; many students work during their college years and most take out educational loans. In American colleges, you constantly meet people between the ages of thirty and forty who have decided to go back to college in order to get a better education; this is exceedingly rare in Germany. Germans can in principle earn the Abitur later in night school, but few do. Once you've got your job, you've got your job, and that's that.

There can be no doubt that the American system is much more friendly, open and accessible to immigrants with insufficient preparation.

While the elite universities in the US do give out scholarships to very talented students from all over the world, there is still an extremely disproportionate number of rich people's kids at these schools. It is clear that students of medium talent have no chance to enter these schools unless their parents are extremely well off.

When looking at higher education in the US (graduate school and research universities), one notices an extremely high proportion of foreigners, to an extent where the system would almost stop to function if the foreigners were to leave. In Germany, foreign professors are very rare, probably because of the language barrier and more restrictive immigration laws, combined with a lower overall attractiveness of the country to foreigners. Furthermore, the old fashioned German universities require a "Habilitation" before someone can teach; this is an additional thesis and exam after the doctorate.

Generally speaking, the average American Ph.D. is less capable and less broadly educated in their field than the average German Dr.rer.nat. Specialization occurs earlier in the US, the time is shorter and many more people of only medium talent pursue a doctorate. Most Ph.D.'s become college teachers with minimal research tasks; such teaching jobs are much rarer in Germany.

The US university system is very prestige oriented; whenever you state your degree, you immediately give also the name of the school where you obtained it. The better universities can afford to maintain high entry requirements; while schools lower on the list have to take all students they can get. By contrast, the German university system is largely homogeneous and degrees are perceived to be equivalent.

Health

It seems to me that while the average American is much more health conscious than the average German, the average German is actually healthier.

The first thing every visitor to the US notices is the immense number of astoundingly obese people. There is a huge obsession with fat-free foods, to the extent that people happily eat sweet desserts as long as they are fat-free. Americans seem to be eating constantly: in the car, at the movie theatres, at work, while watching TV; more often than not, it is fast food or snacks. In many poorer neighbourhoods, the only nearby store is a neighbourhood convenience store which typically sells potato chips, coke, bread and peanut butter but little to no vegetables, fruit, milk or other fresh foods. In Germany, the schedule of three meals a day is still more strictly followed and groceries are much more common than convenience stores.

Many Americans take food supplements and vitamin pills daily, something that Germans sometimes find mildly amusing: "Just eat your vegetables!"

Americans smoke a lot less than Germans and virtually all public spaces except bars are smoke free. People generally look down on smokers as losers. Americans also exercise more, typically in fitness centres, which again many Germans find slightly suspect because of the closeness to body-building, which is generally considered to be utterly ridiculous.

To be fair: nowhere will you see as many drunken people as in Germany.

High tech and critical medical care is more advanced in the US than in Germany. Hospital equipment is generally more up to date and new and experimental treatments are adopted earlier. If you suffer from cancer or need a heart bypass, the US is definitely the place to be. The constant threat of catastrophic malpractice lawsuits keeps the quality of care high. Still, statistically the US fares worse than Germany: infant mortality is about 40% higher (mainly because of the high teenage pregnancy rate and because many poor people with high-risk pregnancies never receive any prenatal care), life expectancy is roughly the same while per capita health care spending is about 60% higher in the US than in Germany.

The treatment of chronic and mental diseases and rehabilitative care is much more advanced in Germany. This is also the area where the lack in health insurance of a large proportion of the US population has the most severe effects; if you suffered a heart attack, you can easily get a free triple bypass, even if you are an undocumented Mexican without health coverage, but American health insurance policies contain only minimal coverage for mental diseases. There are virtually no treatment options for uninsured people with long-term mental health problems short of Social Security disability benefits.

Mobility

In several different senses, the degree of mobility is much higher in the US society than it is in Germany.

First of all, Americans move around a lot more than Germans. It seems that most people don't stay longer than two or three years at the same place, at least until they buy a house.

More importantly, Americans change jobs much more often than Germans. It's not at all unusual to meet someone who had been a soldier, then after retirement became a teacher, and then moved on to become a truck driver. Careers like that simply don't exist in Germany. One reason is probably that virtually every job in Germany requires at least a three year low paid apprenticeship; nobody wants to go through that twice if they don't have to. Generally, the German economy offers a lot fewer low-paid no-training "McJobs" than the American economy does; this is due to much higher labour costs. No supermarket could afford to hire someone simply to stuff customer's plastic bags.

Then there is a lot of mobility between classes. If your parents are workers, than you are much more likely to become a worker yourself in Germany than in the US. (One probably has to exclude the American inner city slums here, which don't allow for much class mobility -- the only realistic perspective for boys seems to be drug dealing and for girls bearing children.) Of course, mobility is not only upward: middle-aged engineers who end up as supermarket clerks after being laid off are not unheard off; sometimes people slide right through into homelessness after losing their job. Generally speaking, the classes in Germany are much more static.

In one sense of the word though, Germany shows more mobility: travelling. Wherever you go in the world, you'll find Germans. They are obsessed with travelling. Many people take two major vacations per year. Clearly, this is facilitated by the fact that Germans get about 6 weeks paid vacation per year plus some 11 (or more if you're in a Catholic state) paid holidays, compared to an average of 3 weeks plus 6 days in the US. There are other obstacles to travelling as well: when I once asked a graduate student I knew in Santa Barbara why his wife and his new-born child never came to visit from San Francisco, he told me that they were afraid to travel because their health plan would only cover illnesses of the child when treated in San Francisco clinics.

Only about 50% of the members of the US House of Representatives have ever left the country. For a German, this is hard to fathom. But then again, Germany is only about the size of Montana.

Diversity

When I first arrived in the States, the thing I liked best was the great diversity in people. Not only the different races, but also the very varied life styles and outlooks on life. Germans are a lot more homogeneous: obviously in their race, but also in their clothes, manners, ideas, values, life styles.

This is only half of the story though. If you walk down a street or take a bus in a big German city today, you'll hear about as many languages as if you did the same in New York City. It's probably still true that Germans are more alike than Americans, but there's more than just Germans in Germany these days!

Discrimination

I find that in several areas, the level of discrimination is lower in the US than in Germany:

Virtually every public bus in the US is equipped with a lift for wheelchairs; this is not very common in Germany. It's also next to impossible for the disabled to take trains in Germany. (On the other hand: the handicapped can ride all trains and buses in Germany for free.)
Handicapped children in the US are routinely educated together with normal children; this is also still the exception in Germany.
All public buildings in the US are accessable by wheelchair, required by law. No such law exists in Germany and many public buildings are not accessable.
Many more women in the US work in traditionally male jobs such as truck driver, carpenter, police officer etc. There are also more women to be found in more prestigious professions, such as lawyer, scientist or manager.
Racism in everyday life is less prevalent in the US than in Germany, and it is discussed more. Americans do not (and cannot) assume that someone who cannot speak proper English or has brown skin must be a foreigner. In Germany, slight grammatical errors as well as foreign features are usually cause for scorn and different treatment. Foreign-looking people are constantly asked to show their papers by police. While some right-wing politicians ride the anti-immigrant wave in the US, the general population's view of immigrants is much more positive than that in Germany, where it is not at all uncommon to overhear a comment like "all they do is steal and take our jobs".
Germany hosts one particularly cruel type of racist discrimination: adoptions of children from poor countries are extremely complicated and only very rarely allowed by the German Jugendämter. (Germans sometimes even agree with these restrictions, fearing the sale of children in poor countries.) International adoptions are much easier and much more common in the U.S.
In Germany, there is quite open age discrimination in the job market, to the extend that 45-year-olds are sometimes told that switching careers, or even only switching jobs, is next to impossible. In the U.S. this is much rarer, and a 50-year-old going back to college to become a teacher or doctor is not unheard of.
There's a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the U.S., but the situation of illegal immigrants is actually much better than that in Germany: undocumented children can go to school without problem (though not to college), hospital visits are possible without fear of being arrested, children born in the U.S. are automatically U.S. citizens, and the wide availability of fake IDs makes life generally pretty easy. In Germany, undocumented children cannot go to school, hospitals have to report suspected illegal immigrants (though few do), and children born to illegal immigrants can never receive any official papers whatsoever.
While there is much more verbal abuse of homosexuals in the US, most of this is just rhetoric by politicians who need to pacify the nut cases on the religious right (whom nobody really takes seriously but who unfortunately like to go out to vote a lot). Homosexuals can marry in one state of the union (Massachusetts) and civil unions offering all the benefits of marriage are available in two other states; the registered partnerships available in Germany are completely hollow as they leave out all the financial benefits of true marriage. Homosexual couples can and often do adopt children in the U.S. which is impossible in Germany.
Christian nuns teaching in Bavarian public schools are allowed to wear full habit and crucifix; female Muslim teachers are not allowed to wear their headscarves. Such open discrimination based on religious belief does not exist in the U.S.

However, there are also other issues. There is widespread structural discrimination against blacks in the US. They often live in poor, crime ridden neighbourhoods with inadequate schools and health care, which quite predictably leads to a dramatically lower life expectancy. The HIV infection rate of blacks is about eleven times higher than the rate of whites, yet governmental safe-sex campaigns directed at blacks are nowhere to be seen.

Another victim of cruel discrimination are the mentally ill, many of whom ended up homeless or in prison when almost all mental institutions were closed in the seventies.

Protections against cruelty to animals are much stronger in Germany. In parts of the U.S. they are missing altogether; e.g. cock fighting is legal in Louisiana.

The Rich

Success in the US is almost exclusively defined as economic success; those who have such success try everything to show it. It is cool to be rich and people look up to the rich, to the extent that someone whose only credential consists of being a billionaire can almost become president (Ross Perot).

By contrast, the rich are not particularly well-liked in Germany. In politics, being extremely rich would certainly be an obstacle. In the back of the German's mind there's still the assumption that someone who owns that much must have exploited others to get it.

The obvious fact that the rich in the US have much better access to health care and legal representation than the poor is generally not seen as an injustice. To Germans, this notion is deeply offensive. When I discussed the O.J. Simpson case with Americans, I would usually point out that he got away with murder because he was rich enough to hire the very best lawyers; many people I spoke to didn't even notice the implied criticism: they replied "Sure, the rich can buy better lawyers. They can also buy better cars. That's what wealth is."

Generally speaking, the average living standard in the US is considerably higher than in Germany. More people own their home, houses are bigger, people own more luxury items and have more disposable income. Two caveats are in order: first, the variation in the US is a lot larger, and the poor in the US are poorer than the poor in Germany. Second, as all Germans will hasten to point out, quality of living is not determined by the number of luxury goods alone: Germans have a lot more vacation time, better mass transit, and much fewer worries about health insurance.

Canada and the Netherlands

There is a strange parallel between the relationships Canada-US and Holland-Germany: the smaller brother looks at the bigger one and finds fault with much of what he sees, he then desperately tries to do everything better, succeeds remarkably well, but tragically, his efforts are completely ignored by the big brother and the rest of the world -- he is simply too small and unimportant.

This is even more tragically in Canada's case since Canada is the biggest trade partner of the US but is still completely and utterly ignored in the US public debate; nobody there knows the Prime Minister or the capital of Canada; Canada simply does not appear in newspapers or news programs.

Someone wrote to me that the relationship between New Zealand and Australia may be similar. One should also point out that the Dutch and German languages are closely related.

Environmental Sensitivity

Environmentalism is much stronger, if more abstract, in Germany. After all, there's virtually no untouched nature left in Germany, especially when compared to US national parks which harbour a breathtaking variety of pristine natural surroundings. Hiking and camping in nature is extremely popular in the US, and so one could argue that Americans are on average closer to nature than Germans.

The abstract, big German environmental issues, such as the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, energy saving, overconsumption, and garbage reduction are almost non-existent in American public debate. Every once in a while, an article appears whose author wonders whether the greenhouse effect really exists (a question that has been considered settled for several years now in Germany). Energy saving is a complete non-topic, and accordingly, energy is wasted at amazing levels. The only fear that appears every once in a while is that the US could become dependent on foreign oil; the concept that fossil fuels are finite and that we will run out soon is very un-American: of course science will come up with wonderful fusion technology just in time. Garbage reduction is almost unheard of. In every supermarket, your purchases are immediately stuffed into paper or plastic bags (sure enough, you get to choose which type of bag: it's the land of the free after all).

In the US, fuel is cheap, cities are spread out, mass transit is poor, many people commute 50 miles a day to work, and large cars are considered to be cool. All this contributes to immense energy consumption.

Environmentalism in the US is often very down-to-earth: getting industry to clean up a certain toxic waste site, protecting a particular endangered species, or preventing a particular piece of land from being developed.

Air pollution standards however are much more stringent in the US than in Germany: catalytic converters had been required 20 years earlier and Diesel engine cars have virtually been regulated out of existence. Particle filters are still not required in German Diesel cars.

While all German parties have embraced the notion that environmentalism is not detrimental to economic progress and in fact can spur technological innovation and export opportunities, most American politicians still see environmental regulations as a direct threat to jobs and to the competitiveness of US businesses.

Charity

Germans donate much more money to charitable causes than Americans. Germans like to support organizations that attack global problems: Unicef, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders, World Hunger organizations etc. By contrast, people in the US prefer to give money to entities that are closer to home: churches, women's shelters, soup kitchens, schools and colleges, AIDS and cancer research. Americans are much more likely to volunteer time for these causes than Germans are. In the US, it is quite common that people volunteer for charitable organizations such as homeless shelters or projects that teach disadvantaged kids how to read. In Germany, volunteerism is normally restricted to initiatives that aim to educate fellow citizens about problems in far away countries.

I see two reasons for these different approaches to charity: first, Americans distrust big organizations and third world governments; they fear that money they donate for global causes will trickle away in bureaucracies somewhere. Second, Germans intuitively don't feel a need to help local organizations or schools: "that's the government's job, that's what I pay taxes for."

Mentalities

If I had to boil it down to a word or two, I'd say naive optimism characterizes the American mentality and deliberate, hesitant pessimism the German one. This is a crass simplification and does not mean that most or even many of the people share those characteristics; it just means that, assuming these mentalities, it is possible to explain many of the differences between the two countries, such as the much higher crime rate in the US, the higher need for security and lower degree of mobility in Germany, the much lower birth rate in Germany, and the higher level of friendliness in the US.

Violence and Aggression

From the outside, the USA look like a terribly violent and aggressive country. Virtually all you hear about the US has something to do with violence: extremely high crime rate, violent movies, death penalty, right to bear arms, bombing of selected third world countries...

Once one enters the country, a couple of items can be added to this list: the news coverage focuses a lot on violence, the violent horror movies in the video stores are openly visible to kids (they are not placed in the adult section together with porn movies as in Germany), extremely harsh punishing even of non-violent criminals (including the recently revived chain gangs in some states), and violent TV cartoons for small kids on Saturday mornings. Generally, Americans have a much higher tolerance for violence in the media (and a much lower tolerance for sex) than Germans. To me, this is perplexing, since America's violence problems seem to be much more severe than Germany's sex problems :-)

A peculiar type of violence, school kids shooting around in schools, is not that uncommon in the US and is very interesting mainly because it seems so puzzling to Americans. Every outside observer immediately concludes that media and video games glorifying violence together with easy availability of guns and adolescent's common psychological problems provide a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. Americans cannot reach this conclusion however because the right to bear arms and the right to free speech are considered sacred. So all they are left with is "these are bad kids", and you actually hear people say that.

Somewhat paradoxically, everyday life is a lot less aggressive in the US than it is in Germany. People are generally more polite and friendly. Phrases like "please", "thank you", "excuse me" and "you are welcome" are a lot more common in the US. It happens all the time that a nice girl that you have never met before smiles at you for no apparent reason. (In Germany, they do it only if they have a very good reason, which means that you're in business.) If you wait in line in an American supermarket, you don't have to constantly watch out for people who try to slip in in front of you.

Traffic is much more relaxed in the states, very unlike the all-out war going on on German streets and highways, with tail gating and drivers cutting you off. People in the US actually drive slowly and cautiously, even though virtually everyone can get a driver's license at age 16 after taking a trivial test. Germany requires months of expensive training and a difficult test, but people still don't understand the concept of defensive driving.

The higher friendliness in the US is often noticed by German travellers, who will typically then add "but people are terribly superficial". There may be some truth to that, but a lot of it is just a consequence of faulty translations. Words describing emotional states are generally used much more liberally in the US than in Germany and common dictionary translations are often wrong. People will call you a "friend" if you have had a nice 15 minute talk with them; the German "Freund" is only used for someone that you have known for a long time and are emotionally close to. Similarly for words like "hate" or "love".

The American friendliness is fragile however and is mixed with a strange moralistic streak: if somebody does something considered morally wrong, the normal sympathy and empathy is immediately and utterly withdrawn and exchanged with heart-felt condemnation.

Even though the overall crime rate is much higher in the US than in Germany, low-level "nuisance crimes" such as pick-pocketing, car vandalism and bicycle theft are much rarer. Americans are generally trusting and it is quite common that they leave their house entrance doors unlocked during the day, something Germans never do, except in the countryside. Germans like their front doors to be massive, while American doors normally can be broken in with modest force.

Like most things, crime is more evenly distributed in Germany than it is in the US. The higher American crime rate is mainly due to inner city pockets of gang violence; outside these pockets, life is just as safe as in Germany.

In Germany, there are violent clashes between opposing soccer fans and police almost every weekend. This does not happen in the US.

Maybe a more descriptive term than "impolite" for the typical German is "anal-retentive". If you're short a couple of pennies when paying at a supermarket checkout, they will make you search, with the line waiting behind you. Little "give a penny/ take a penny" baskets don't exist there, and the concept goes against everything a German believes in. Everything has to go by the book, and Germans like to be right. No doubt, Americans are more relaxed.

It seems that there is a lot of tension and aggression buried in the average German, maybe as a result of the much higher population density. The level of friendliness, relaxedness and unaggressiveness seems to be higher on the West coast of the states and lowest in the big "quasi-European" cities of the East.

Comparing the political debates in the two countries is rather illuminating. The speeches of German politicians are generally less controversial, more inclusive and often hint at compromises. (They are also more substantial.) By contrast, politicians in the US have no problem talking about an outright "cultural war" (between the left and the right) and regularly accuse their opponents of everything from stupidity to adultery. But when it comes to physical political violence, Germany is far ahead. If a leading politician gives a speech in the open, he can expect having foul eggs thrown at him. People will shout and whistle in order to disrupt the speech. None of that ever happens in the US. The president can actually give a speech at a university and everyone will be polite and listen -- a very strange concept for German students. This is even more astounding if one takes into account that the difference in viewpoints between the Left and the Right in Germany is much smaller than that between the Left and the Right in the US.

Political demonstrations, smaller and rarer in the US than in Germany, are also a lot less violent. Politically motivated riots, which happen regularly in Germany, are rare in America. This is probably because young people tend to be more political in Germany, and kicking the butt of a policeman is still the easiest way to fight the system.

The logical next step is then political terrorism, which in Germany exists both on the left and on the right but is (at least in its organized form) almost unheard of in the US. It fits the picture that the terrorism that the US sees either comes from foreign countries or is the deed of fringe individualists.

Influence of Religion

In Germany, state and church are closely related, in a manner which must seem appalling to most Americans who believe in the complete separation of church and state. The "Konkordat", a contract entered into by Hitler and the Vatican in 1933 (Hitler offered it to have the church keep quiet about the Holocaust, and it worked out rather well), as well as "Kirchenverträge" with the Evangelical Church mandate that churches get to teach religion in public schools, that the state collects church dues in the form of "church taxes", and that churches get access to public universities in order to train their clergy. Most of the German holidays are religious. Blasphemy, "if capable of jeopardizing public peace", is a punishable crime. The biggest German party is called "Christian-Democratic Union".

All this has surprisingly little effect though; the Christian churches have far less influence on public life in Germany than in the US and are rapidly losing members. (Only Catholicism in Bavaria is a holdout.) The main reason is that the overall degree of religiosity in the population is much lower. In the US, many people actually go to church every Sunday, something mostly reserved for lonely elderly women in Germany. The proportion of people believing in God is higher in the US than in any other industrialized country. In Germany, people will laugh at you if you tell them that you literally believe the fairy tales of the Bible; only some sort of "abstract religiosity" or better still "spirituality" is acceptable. A shocking eye-opener for me was when I overheard two young women, maybe 20 years old, at the next table in a coffee shop, eagerly discussing the subtleties of a Bible story! In the US, there are many people who believe what the Bible says word for word, and they are not ashamed to say so. This may be an instance of a more general fact: Germans are a lot more sceptical and critical than Americans. Four little examples:

Many people in the US believe in UFO abductions.
Americans will happily apply a chemical bug spray in their kitchen as long as it says "safe for humans" on the label.
Americans believe that they have "saved" money if they buy something for $50 which has a crossed-out label of $100 attached to it.
People actually send loads of money to Christian faith healers who stage the most ridiculous of TV shows.

In Germany, the Catholic Church is generally considered to be more conservative than the protestant churches in social and political issues; the situation in the US is opposite. People on the "religious right", a large and influential movement populated mostly by white protestants, are vehemently opposed to abortion (several abortion doctors have been killed by people on the fringes), believe in the literal truth of the Bible to the extend of opposing Darwinism (these people are called "creationists", a word that doesn't even exist in German nor would it be needed), oppose premarital sex, and call homosexuality a sinful choice. These same people also enthusiastically embrace the death penalty, private ownership of guns, military spending and lower taxes, without even noticing a contradiction to the Christian message of "Don't judge, live poor, love your enemies".

A number of US states still have laws on the books prohibiting atheists from holding public office. (These laws are not enforced.)

The bigot Christian influence can be felt throughout American life: no swearing on radio or TV is allowed (it is rather ironic to hear a beep whenever someone tried to say "fuck", especially in a country which prides itself in strong opposition to censorship), no nudity whatsoever on TV either, and no substantial sex education in the schools (resulting in the highest teen pregnancy rate of the developed world). The media discuss the whole topic of sex only in the context of crime or disease: there is a huge obsession with child molestation, rape, sexual harassment, AIDS etc.; Hollywood rarely shows sex in love movies but almost exclusively in "erotic thrillers", films which intimately link sex to some crime. Crimes involving sex generally carry higher penalties than non-sexual crimes. Many states publish name, offence, photo and address of past sex offenders on the internet; these laws do not apply to murderers or other violent criminals. The advertised cure for AIDS is abstinence; ads favouring condom use cannot be shown on national broadcast TV and a broad condom promotion billboard campaign by the government as in Germany is unthinkable. It is also more difficult to buy condoms in the US; they are not available in most public restrooms as in Germany. Even in swinger clubs, condom use is not consistent in the US. Public nudity at nudist beaches or in co-ed saunas (as in every medium sized German town) is extremely rare; even in saunas Americans are typically not nude. Women are not allowed to go topless at public beaches. Life sex acts cannot be shown in sex theatres. Anal or oral sex, even between married adults, are illegal in several US states; while these laws are almost never enforced, no lawmaker would dare to attempt to change them (the Supreme Court finally struck down all these laws in 2003). Some southern states in the US even prohibit the sale of vibrators. Topics like legalization of prostitution are utterly unmentionable.

The word "rape" is used in a much broader sense than the common German dictionary translation "Vergewaltigung". The latter means "using physical force to achieve intercourse", while "rape" is nowadays often used in America in the sense of "an unpleasant sexual experience that was later regretted by one party".

Still, the matter is not completely black-and-white; the American puritanism often only covers the surface. While it is legal in the US to display hard core pornography on Internet web sites open to all, this is not allowed in Germany. Similarly, sex magazines that can be bought at regular newsstands are harder in the US than in Germany; in the US, satellite hard core porn channels can be ordered and this is not possible in Germany. There is no radio program in Germany as graphic as Howard Stern. There are certainly more strip clubs in the US than in Germany (a consequence of the higher taboo surrounding public nudity). The sexual revolution began in America, America initiated the mainstreaming of pornography, and today the US porn industry feeds the whole world and is comparable in size to Hollywood. Abortion regulations are more liberal in the US than in Germany. Many of these freedoms come courtesy of the Supreme Court, which is very powerful and quite liberal on some topics. Indeed, throughout history, lots of progressive changes in US legislation can be traced back to Supreme Court decisions; legislatures are often too scared for bold moves.

It is also my impression that the atmosphere at US colleges is more sexually charged (clothing, flirting, partying etc.) than that at German universities. This however could have something to do with the fact that American students are on average a couple of years younger than German ones.

In Germany, there's a general ban on working on Sundays and holidays, with a number of specific exceptions. This ban is supported by the churches: after all, it's the content of the third (or fourth, depending on who you ask) of the Ten Commandments. The Verfassungsgericht upheld the ban, pointing to the important spiritual content of Sundays. In the US, Sunday work is legal and very common, and Christians don't make an issue of it. God's Commandments are seemingly less important if we're talking business.

Another strange contradiction given the strong religious base is the enthusiastic embrace of exotic reproduction techniques and genetic modification in the US. Research on human embryos and human cloning is legal in the US (but not funded by the federal government) and illegal in Germany, as are rent-a-womb arrangements where a woman carries the fetus of another couple. Sperm banks which sell sperm based on the donor's features also don't exist in Germany.

Selective enforcement of laws

Maybe one of the most important experiences one makes when living in a foreign country is to realize the amazing arbitrariness that exists everywhere when it comes to enforcing laws. Here are some of the differences I observed:

Alcohol laws. In order to drink alcohol, even beer, you need to be at least 21 in the US. If you look younger than 30, you actually have to show an ID card when buying alcohol in a supermarket or when entering a bar. Police hire youngsters for undercover alcohol buying and do arrest people for drinking alcohol in public, or even for walking around with an open container. In Germany, there is probably a law against youths drinking alcohol, but I don't even know the legal drinking age. (Actually, you can drink beer with 16 and liquor with 18). It certainly is not enforced and the issue never comes up in public debate. Drinking in public is perfectly legal; generally alcohol is much easier available in Germany than in the US.
Jaywalking. In Germany, if a policeman is around, pedestrians won't cross a red traffic light. If they do, they will surely get a warning or even a ticket. If there is no policeman around, other pedestrians will sometimes become agitated about this behaviour. Both of these do not happen in the US, even though jaywalking is illegal just the same.
Car registrations, driver licenses and car insurance. In the US, just as in Germany, your car has to be registered, you have to have a driver's license, and you have to carry car insurance in order to be allowed to drive. In Germany, driving without a license is considered a major infraction, and driving without registration or without insurance is virtually unheard of. People actually get agitated if they see a car without a license plate. In the US, you often see cars without plates, and no one seems to care much. What's more, laws that require to carry insurance are not enforced at all, and many people simply don't do it.
If you ride a bicycle in Germany which does not have proper lights, night or day, policemen will stop you. In the US, even though there are rules for bikes to have lights, most bikes don't and no one seems to care. People actually ride at night without lights.
Illegal immigration: a giant topic in the US political debate of course, but the existing laws are simply not enforced. Everyone knows that the entire Californian agriculture industry would break down were it not for illegal Mexican migrant workers. In everyday life, your visa is never checked; in eight years, I have never shown mine to anybody except at the airport. Local police don't care about these things, it's a federal issue, but the federal government mainly protects the borders. Fake greencards and other papers can be bought relatively easily, and they are not too expensive. (Many college kids carry fake identification in order get into bars.) I believe that it is much harder and more expensive to get a hold on false identification in Germany. In addition, whenever a German policeman stops you, you have to show your visa.

Dress Code

Older people dress a lot more conservatively in Germany than in the US. It's not uncommon to see a seventy-year-old American in shorts, sneakers, t-shirt and base ball cap; this is unthinkable in Germany.

Business people dress identically in the two countries, and younger people also dress similarly for the most part. The gang style dress code (gold chains, baggy pants, sneakers, bandannas) is quite common among male black teenagers in the US; in Germany, nobody dresses like this and the style is only known from rap videos (apparently this has changed a bit recently though).

In summer, German women sometimes don't wear a bra, which is much less common in the US. If they wear a bra, German women usually try to hide it by wearing loose fitting shirts; American women often wear tight fitting t-shirts under which the bra is clearly visible.

T-shirts with funny texts printed on are much more common in the US.

A couple of things I find annoying in the two countries:

In Germany, most public spaces, restaurants, and offices are full of smoke. (Recently, some improvements can be observed.) People habitually throw cigarette butts on the ground.
In German restaurants, asking for free water with your food is frowned upon and uncommon.
In Germany, when you have eaten in a restaurant, taking the leftovers with you is typically frowned upon; they are thrown away. In the US, it is customary to ask for a box.
US restaurants usually stop serving food at 10pm, some already at 9pm (except junk food joints). In Germany you can eat till midnight.
In the US, when you enter a restaurant, you have to wait for a waiter to seat you; generally you cannot freely choose your table. In Germany, you just sit down wherever you want.
In the US, foods are often served in a way which makes it impossible to eat them in a civilized manner, for instance tremendously huge hamburgers or too long French fries.
Waiters in US restaurants have a habit of coming to your table while you are eating or while you are talking, interrupt you and ask "Is everything OK?". Sometimes they even try to start a fake conversation.
Bottles with crown caps in the US can always be opened without a bottle opener, by simply turning the cap. In Germany, you need a bottle opener.
In Germany, there are almost no motels, and there are very few cheap ways to spend a night, especially close to the highways.
In Germany, TV shows start at varying, strange times. In the US, all shows on all channels always start on the full hour.
The US uses absolutely brain-dead bank notes: all denominations have the same size, feel and color. Furthermore, the largest denomination is only $100.
German dog owners almost never collect their dog's faeces. In the US, most cities require this and most dog owners do it.
In German cinemas, you have to endure a much longer barrage of commercials.
German jelly donuts contain a lot less jelly than American ones.
In the US, you can open beer bottles without a bottle opener, by turning the lid. Not possible in Germany.
In the US, apartments or houses for rent or sale are commonly advertised with a large sign in front of the house. In Germany this isn't done: you have to find the address from ads in newspapers, on the internet or from real estate agents, which is annoying.
Most US bookstores have coffee shops and armchairs and are open till 11 pm, also on the weekends. Most German ones discourage browsing, don't offer coffee and close at 8 pm, and don't open at all on Sundays.
Cheerleaders, high school girls cheering and dancing in short dresses for the boys' sport teams, actually do exist in the US. I had always thought they only exist on TV, just like the laughter in the background of soap operas. But no: girls actually do want to be cheerleaders. To Germans, the whole setup is ridiculous, sexist, and degrading.
In the US, prices are always stated without sales tax, so you never know in advance how much you actually have to pay.
Americans have a strange obsession with the points of the compass. Frequently inside a building you will find signs like "This elevator is out of order. Please use the one on the North side of the building." How am I supposed to know where North is? Why can't they just tell me where the elevator is?
By contrast, German highway signs are unusable for foreigners (and many Germans) since they eschew points of the compass completely. In order to navigate on German Autobahnen, you need to know the relative locations of all cities in Germany. The signs won't say "B1 East" and "B1 West", but instead "B1 Richtung Bochum" and "B1 Richtung Unna" and you are supposed to know that Unna is East of Bochum.
Worse, highway intersections in Germany use an utterly brain-dead and dangerous layout where the cars that are slowing down and leaving a highway have to share a stretch of road with those speeding up and joining the highway. I don't think that system is in use anywhere else.

Some miscellaneous differences:

Everything is bigger in the US than it is in Germany: people, meal portion sizes, coffee cups, cars, cell phones, beds, refrigerators, squirrels.
To get satellite TV in Germany, you buy an antenna and receiver and then you can watch for free; in the US, you sign a contract, get antenna, receiver and decoder for free, and pay a monthly fee for the content (which is encoded).
To call a cell phone in Germany, you pay a high per-minute fee; in the US the callee pays.
In the US, you pay income taxes to the federal government and separately to your home state; in Germany only the federal government collects income taxes.
When you rent an apartment in the US, the stove and fridge is normally included; in Germany you typically have to bring your own.
In the US, credit cards have a real credit line: you can pay back the balance at your own pace; in Germany, credit cards suck the full balance out of your bank account at the end of every month. German bank accounts come with a standard credit line: you can simply overdraw them; this is comparatively rare in the US.
If a German is abducted in some foreign country, German diplomats will engage in negotiations and usually eventually pay some money to the kidnappers. The U.S. does not engage in such negotiations, clearly the correct strategy.
Copyright in the U.S., for the most part, consists simply in the right to copy and/or modify a work. This right can be given up or sold off. Germany's Urheberrecht in addition gives several "moral" rights to the creator which cannot be sold or given up, for instance the right to just compensation for every copy and the right to veto changes to the work.
Germans think that natural yellow egg yolk looks "unhealthy" and pale and prefer their egg yolk orange, which is why German farmers feed their chicken’s orange pigments.
What is called "erste Etage" in Germany is called "second floor" in the US.
Graffiti is of higher quality and more colourful in Germany, where it is sometimes viewed as approaching an art form; in the US it mostly consists of simple tagging and is almost always seen as a law enforcement problem.
Soccer is seen as a men's sport in Germany and as a women's sport in the US.
In Germany, if they see police, people often think something is wrong; in the U.S., if they see police, people usually feel safe.

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