La deutsche Vita

Big cars, fat wallets and old men dressed in tailor-made suits in a country full of stressed-out workaholics who wouldn’t dare cross the street on red. When Ardit came to Germany from Albania, he was sure he’d find a country full of strictly obedient and enormously wealthy people. Fortunately, he discovered something completely different.  

by Fabian Köhler

"Dadoooooooo, doodoo... Dadoooooooo, doodoo.” No, the keys on my computer keyboard didn’t get stuck. Actually, the Albanian-born Ardit is trying to give me a hint about who shaped his view of Germany in the very beginning. He continues, “A wise old man, wears a Rolex, solves every case, trench coat?” The answer is Derrick, of course, that famous German TV detective. It was Derrick who not only taught Ardit his first lessons in German, but also introduced him to the most basic German clichés.

Germany as paradise

“Somewhere in the boondocks in the Albanian mountains,” Ardit came in contact with German for the first time, watching one of his parents’ VHS cassettes. It was about – as he puts it – “Paradise in Barbed Wire”. Back then he was convinced that Germany was a modern version of the land of milk and honey. A country where the size of one’s beer belly was a measure of one’s wealth and where kids received BMWs when they turned 18. “German inspector” was the most popular profession among his classmates at school, even beating out cosmonauts. “The most popular boy in the schoolyard wasn’t the one who had the newest video game console. The big boss was the one who had a brother in Germany and could even say a few words in German.”  

However, the price Germans had to pay for such affluence and carefree lifestyle, Ardit explains with a grin, was absolute obedience. He remembers how a classmate told him that there were no police in Germany, because people voluntarily obeyed all the laws. People in Germany were more frightened of sitting down next to someone in the bus than they were of crime. They respected the red light at the crosswalk even more than their own parents. Everything in Germany revolved around work. Germans tended to frown on humor and relaxation.  

Reality looked different

Several years later, Ardit came to live in this country. The paradise of his childhood stood in contrast to real life in a prefab housing settlement in Halle-Neustadt. Some distant relatives on his mother’s side had invited Ardit and his family to live with them. All eight of them were squeezed into a three-room flat. Life was financially more stable than back home, but nobody was rich, Ardit explains. “The architecture reminded me more of the concrete eyesores built during the communist times in Albania than the beautiful, old-town settings in Derrick.” But he wasn’t too disappointed. “It took some time until I finally accepted what real life was like in Germany, but when I did, I really started liking it.”

Although the Germans were not as wealthy as he had believed, they were able to actually enjoy themselves. “I was surprised that I couldn’t find any German workaholics who took no joy in life.” Ardit, who is now an Ethnology major, discovered something completely different – “La deutsche Vita” as he calls it. “At university, we spent afternoons sitting at cafés or on the riverbank, dangling our legs and just whiling away our time. During my school years in Albania, that was completely out of the question.”   

Derrick's international

Ardit has now been living in Germany for ten years. Not only have his views of Germans changed, but also Germans themselves have changed. “I find they’ve become more open, they’ll even sit down next to you on the bus. And as for me, I wait at every crosswalk when the light’s red,” he laughs. But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed. “Since I received the entire series on DVD, I’ve been watching Derrick again,” he admits. But when he sees the old man with the Rolex, he doesn’t think of the rich paradise he once believed was Germany. In fact, it reminds him of his childhood in the Albanian mountains.

Extra: The Derrick Theme Song