If you move to Germany, it may be a little difficult to break the ice and make new friends, so the best way to accomplish this is to throw a party for all of your acquaintances.
 
Planning
Plan ahead at least 2 months. Inform neighbors that it may be loud, and give a polite invitation to your next-door neighbors to join in.
 
Food
If you are female you are expected to prepare something hot and at least 4 types of salad, plus have snacks available at all times. If you are male then you need to provide at least salty sticks. Anything extra is going above and beyond the call of duty, and as a male you will receive great praise for your efforts.
 
Drink
You can tell your friends to each bring a bottle (especially good for birthday parties as a substitute for presents), or you can be a hero and supply everything yourself.  If you are female you need to make Bowle, unless it´s Christmas time, then you have to make Glühwein or you need to find a man to make your Bowle into the Feuerzangen variety. 
 
Decorations
Males over 30 are only required to find some beer garden style benches to set the ambiance. Women are required to make sure that the ratio of male to female attendees is roughly equal and to make the party setting pretty.
 
Setting the mood
The most important thing to Germans is what they call the Stimmung, or the general feel-good atmosphere of the party. There won’t ever be any Stimmung before 10 pm, and if there isn’t any Stimmung by 11 pm, then there never will be any, and your party will be deemed a flop, a waste of a good Friday or Saturday evening for all involved.
 
The critical element to creating the Stimmung is the music selection. Building the Stimmung is a delicate process of leading up to the general acceptance of terrible old German music. If you begin the evening playing German Schlager, no one will stay for your party, but if you don’t end the party playing German Schlager, your party is considered a failure.  In America you often want to impress your friends by playing music from bands that they haven’t heard of before, the opposite is true in Germany, you want to only play music that they know by heart.
 
Begin with the current top 40 music as a light background of familiarity and comfort while people get to know each other and can move from the safe topics of soccer, weather, and how stupid Americans are into more interesting conversations. When you notice that people have loosened up a bit, proceed with more classic rock like Bon Jovi and Bryan Adams and hits such as the Summer of ‘69, which will help people get into that happy nostalgic feeling of reminiscing about how much fun they had back when they were a teenager, even if they are only 23.
 
Now that you have given people a taste of the imminent Stimmung, you need to pull it back a bit and play some darker music to add in some energy but also a bit of aggression. Your guests might enjoy a harder song or two, but soon they will demand new music to lighten up the mood, which gives you the chance to inject the dance music into the party, which will be greeted with universal enthusiasm causing the more outgoing guests to rush to the dance floor and get the grooving started.
 
This is a critical milestone, because no dancing means no Schlager. If you fail to accomplish this, you can give up now and recommend moving the party to a disco where a professional DJ has done the job correctly. However, if you have accomplished this, sigh a breath of relief, it´s time to finally enjoy everyone enjoying themselves. During the dance hits phase you must include either “Walking on Sunshine”  or “It’s Raining Men”. This phase should last about half an hour which leads directly into the moment every German has been waiting for, the chance to hear the same songs they’ve heard at every other party and every single night at the disco, the German Schlager. You must have at least the following tracks on hand:

• Schön ist es auf der Welt zu sein
• Moskau
• Ein Bisschen Spass muss sein
• Griechischer Wein
• The complete works of Dieter Thomas Kuhn
• Ti Amo
• Major Tom
• Er hat ein knallrotes Gummibot
• Die Hände zum Himmel
• Marmor, Stein und Eisen bricht
• Flieger grüß mir die Sonne
• Auf der Reeperbahn (only required north of the Weisswurstäquator)
• Er gehört zu mir
• Westerland
   

Other popular ones, but which are optional:

• Im Wagen vor mir
• Skandal im Sperrbezirk
• 10 Kleine Jägermeister or something from the Ärzte
• Aber bitte mit Sahne
• Pure Lust am Leben
• Der Kommisar
• Verlieben, verloren, vergessen, verzeih’n
   

When you are ready for your guests to leave, you should play Time to Say Goodbye, My Way, or Sierra Madre,  so that they know that the party is over and they should either go home or find a corner to pass out in. Generally, you know whether you have attained the Stimmung, but if on the next day you aren’t sure, a definite indicator is if a guest wakes up on the floor in the morning singing Eisgekühlter Bommerlunder or anything by the Flippers.

If you move to Germany, be prepared to be called an Ami, for your fellow countrymen to be referred to as die Amis, and your country as Amiland. It’s ok. Don’t get bent out of shape about it.

Look, we all know America isn’t the most popular place right now, but you don’t need be too sensitive here. That’s just the way Germans talk about things in way that is either endearing or disrespectful, or a little of both. If your name is Michael, you’re gonna be called Michi, if Helmut then Heli, if Schweinsteiger then Schweini, and if you’re American, then Ami. It’s only natural.

Since Germans are even more politically correct than we are, they feel like they have to say the awkward term “US-American” to designate us from Canadians and the other countries around these continents, even though those guys would never refer to themselves as Americans, and no one ever refers to the people of these countries collectively as the Americans.  With the term Ami, however, Germans can save themselves 4 syllables and a hyphen.

However, if the word Ami has any prefix in front of it, then you know its derogatory. Then it’s ok to get bent out of shape.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden

If you want to make career in Germany, there is one thing you need to grow, and that is a mustache.

In America we generally want our leaders clean shaven, but the opposite is true in Germany. 73% of managers at all levels in German companies sport a mustache, a percentage which is much higher than the general workforce.

Now we know correlation is not causality, so not only do you need to grow a mustache, you need to also become the type of person who would grow a mustache.

Please also note, any form of mustache, no matter how ridiculously shaped, is perfectly acceptable.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden

English is easy to pronounce. German is not. We don’t put any dots on our letters, or make weird b shapes and call them a pair of s’s. Germans know their language is filled with sounds foreigners can’t make, so they try to get you to say certain words so that they can mock you. Such words include:

Eichhörnchen - This is the classic trap Germans set for us.

Oachkatzlschwoaf - This is the Bavarian cousin of the aforementioned.

Streichholzschächtelchen - This is the ultimate impossible German word to say.

But pretty much any word that starts with an “r”, such as rechts, is physically impossible for us to say. Avoid these words.

If you decide to learn to speak German despite the ample warnings given here previously, you will have to cope with Germans who will either make you say one of these words to mock you directly and openly, or repeat everything you say to them but in correct German, or worse at parties or on TV shows talk to you with a fake American accent.

For the amusement of the German readers, John presents his fake Bavarian accent in the attached audio clip: Fake Bavarian

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblenden

If you work in Germany, you may want to make a good impression with your coworkers to show you are an integral part of the team. In America, you may spontaneously bring some donuts to the office to spread goodwill. Don’t do that in Germany. In Germany you should bring meat.

Germans don’t like things to happen spontaneously, so instead you should plan to bring a meat breakfast a few days ahead of schedule, and you should put together a spreadsheet to email out, in which each meat eating participant can write down exactly how much they will consume. In Schwabia you should bring exactly the amount written down, because it would be foolish of you to buy extra for the chance that any go to waste. Anywhere else you should throw in some extra portions, because some more people will always show up for free meat. Remember, Germans like to plan things out, so they need to be notified a couple of days in advance, so that they don’t have to eat an extraneous breakfast at home or fill their incredibly tiny refrigerator with extra food that will spoil if not consumed within 2 days.

The choice of which meat to bring is straightforward. Ask a colleague if you live north or south of the White Sausage Equator. If south, then your spreadsheet needs to contain the following columns: Name, Nr. Weisswurst, Nr. Bretzel, Nr. Weissbier. Again, in Schwabia, you can check to make sure that the people take exactly what they wrote down, which will be the case 99% of the time. In southern Germany it’s pretty much ok to have a beer at work now and then. It doesn’t look great if you are trying to climb the corporate ladder, but if you want to keep your position for life, it’s fine, enjoy a beer with breakfast. Don’t forget to bring some butter. You can impress your colleagues there by calling it der Butter instead of die Butter.

If you live north of the equator, then your spreadsheet needs to contain the column: Name. You will bring two freshly baked rolls per person, and a big bucket of raw beef with some onions in it. Your butcher will tell you how much of this Mett you need to satisfy the given quantity of meat eaters. Bring some orange juice along with it, because drinking alcohol at work in northern Germany isn’t really a common thing. Eating spreadable raw beef is pretty straightforward, just put it on a roll and enjoy, and try to cover your mouth with one hand while you pick the onions out of your teeth with the other.

Eating Weisswurst is a bit more complicated on the other hand. First of all you need to make sure to bring lots of sweet mustard, because spicy mustard is unacceptable. The second most important step is to decide how you will consume this treat. The are basically two options with two distinct strategies. If you want to look like one of the local folks, alternate between dipping the boiled sausages into the mustard and sucking it straight out of the pig’s intestine down your throat. If you want to look like you are interested in advancing your career, carefully cut along the top, then cut the sausage in half, and gingerly remove the sausage wrapper as you dip each carefully sliced bite size bit into the mustard.

We recommend you only eat two of these, or else your stomach is going to bother you for the rest of the day, and you won’t get much work done. Also, never, ever break the rule of eating white sausage in the afternoon, as this is strictly forbidden.

deutsche Übersetzung für Astrid ein/ausblend