France vs, Germany

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé
Contre nous de la tyrannie
|: L'étendard sanglant est levé :|
Entendez vous dans les campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras,
égorger vos fils, vos compagnes
Aux armes citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons, marchons,
Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.

do i dare post the lyrics to "die Wacht am Rhein," lest folks here think i'm a neo-Nazi?!?

voting Germany in this poll is an admission of complicity with the Axis powers

no ... but a Pickelhaube is more bad-ass than a kepi.

difficult, will have to think abt this

welcome back steve tyler mayne

^^

Can't quite remember the joke about European heaven and European hell

Once on this board I suggested I preferred German bread to French bread. I would like to renounce that idiocy now, in the interests of truth & reconciliation.

Yes! Euler I knew this day would come! got half a mind to go get started on some pain de campagne in celebration

france, pretty obv

think germany is gonna win

When I said that, I was living in France & my judgment was clouded by the fact that I was eating French bread EVERY SINGLE DAY, so German bread had the allure of novelty.

think germany is gonna win

pffff, france is going to surrender before the poll ends.

france. i've spent about 12 hours in france that weren't traveling in a car or in CDG. i stayed in a hotel in rennes overnight on the way to italy as a child (wow that was a long drive). i've never been to germany.

but i'm juding this on being probably more into maupassant, erik satie and flaubert etc. than i am into beethoven and goethe or whatevs.

germany makes better dance music tho.

beethoven and goethe have vanquished their foes and are doing unseemly things to the corpse

Germany but it all comes down to the very arbitrary decision of which language I chose to continue in yr8 at school

this is france tho i think

France.

France is a nice place where they eat nice, sophisticated things and have nice, sophisticated thoughts. I can't be doing with it and the French can't be doing with the simple-minded junk-eating rosbif likes of me coming along looking untidy and talking their language badly, too slowly. So, Germany.

http://eggbeater.typepad.com/shuna/images/img_6973.jpg

^^^^
there is literally nothing within the entire country of germany that is as delicious as this

i prefer Debussy and Satie to Wagner and Schönberg

[i]there is literally nothing within the entire country of germany that is as delicious as this[/i[

IDK about that ... Germany IS the Land of Chocolate.

with that said, French food DOES kick German food by a mile.

Pssst it does not.

Was kidding about France. Germany by a long mile. Love you Germany pls don't revoke my citizenship now, k? Thanks.

Seriously for personal reasons I could never not pick Germany but I've spent a fair amount of time in both places and genuinely just like Germany more. France is lovely but it's really fucking . . . French.

the German language is more difficult to learn than the French language. so i feel more like a smarty for having some degree of knowledge of German than i do for knowing some French.

Yes.

Also, German food can be really delicious and the desserts are amazing so iatee not OTM above. As far as art stuff they've both produced wonderful stuff so chosing on that basis seems ridiculous.

germany makes better dance music tho.

beg to differ - not much between them tho

Germany IS the Land of Chocolate.

is odd because Belgium and Switzerland get all that glory really

feel like France has everything Germany has really, plus extra (except shitter cars?)

Berlin > Paris

if you threw Austria into the mix w/ Germany (wr2 food, music, art, commerce, philosophy, et. al.) then it would be even more lopsided towards the Teutons. adding Belgium or Quebec to France doesn't quite rebalance things IMHO.

then there's Switzerland, and their very fucked-up version of the German language:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Prew3Zi-qIQ

Even my father who is a native German speaker sometimes has trouble understanding Germany when spoken by Swiss ppl.

Wait holy crap the host of that show sounds like he's speaking Swedish or something. I understood what the fist guy was saying but the host? No way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC6mNbvUgoQ&feature=related

the germans will be buoyed by the respect shown for their cultural history in this thread. it's been a difficult century for the western european nation, what with the demise of the prussian settlement and several genocides presaging the disappointing second superpitcher album. but at the end of the day it's all about france - head man sarkozy will have been delighted by the showing for the latinate french, and one thing is for certain - both countries will still be key players in the european scene in the weeks and months ahead.

France is lovely but it works in ways I find pretty oppressive. Germany feels more like home. Or maybe I've been unlucky in France and lucky in Germany.

(Or, I can get the German brand of interaction with strangers and foreigners and don't mind trying to deal with it, as it's much the same as the British one, but the French one rubs me the wrong way)

Correct answer is "Belgium".

Even Belgium disagrees with that

when i was in college, my friends and i came up with this scenario that there really wasn't a French language ... that French was really an elaborate gag, made up by putting "le" and "de" in front of perfectly fine English words. then again, maybe we were too stoned and watched too much Pepe le Pew cartoons. German, though, always seemed WAY more foreign than French.

Oh man, one of those Swiss German guys I could've sworn was speaking Dutch - lots of "khh" sounds, at one point he says something which sounds like "twee monat" with a Dutch "w" sound. And yes, then he drops into Swedish chef...

xp really? that is like the opposite of how I feel about French and German (well, ok, not quite; French is not too alien to read, whereas German sentence structure and word concatenation gets unwieldy fast, but the pronunciation is very alien to me, even after 7 years of French lessons I never could tell when to use which vowel sound or which consonants would be silent and which wouldn't)

They don't know what they've got xp.

I love Germans the most when they are interpreted by the French.

It depends on whether you want a new car or a decent meal, a guttural slag heap or a cornucopia of useless vowels.

My sole experience of Deutschland is a stopover in Munich airport on the way to Budapest. While there I scored an amazing hearty meal of roast duck, potatoes and sauerkraut, plus a beer, for something like eight euros. So good work there, Germany.

France, no competition.

Germany's just got so little to be truly joyous about. Berlin, Köln and Hamburg are among my favourite cities, I love the language, Goethe, krautrock, tv-shows about literature that are actually good and not an insult to intelligence, Nico... All fantastic things. But that's about.

With France, I don't even know where to begin. The list would be endless.

Voted Germany for beer, music, and sauerkraut.

Seriously, Satie over Schoenberg is sheer lunacy. Debussy is at least a fair fight.

Already, I'm embarrassed because Schoenberg was Austrian and if I include him on Germany's side, I may as well count Belgian ales on France's.

I'm just wondering but did Austrians before wwii actually think of themselves as 'Austrian not German', rather than 'Austrian and German' or 'German'?

Excepting the non-Germans living in the Republic of Austria obviously

i forgot that Schoenberg was Austrian. my bad. i still prefer Satie (though i like Schoenberg well enough).

Germany has a fighting chance with Goether & krautrock, but the fact that France is home to Balzac, Flaubert AND Proust clinches it...

France vs. Russia would be harder...

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

the poll result that restored my faith in humanity

france vs england might have been more interesting

i fart in this poll's general direction.

i really like Strasbourg

This poll blows but Strasbourg is awesome. It's about a 45 min drive from my grandmother's house so we usually go there when I visit. I really love it.

best of both worlds!

yeah there was something about it, i spent 2 months in europe after i finished college and that was one of maybe 2 or 3 cities where i felt totally "at home" and could see myself living there. like when i walked the streets it wasn't "oh wow, look at that amazing historical edifice" altho it had that kind of thing, it was more, "wow, there's some apartment buildings there, how much would it cost for me to live here?"

Yeah, I know what you mean. I actually remember saying, "I want to live here" at one point. It's just really interesting and beautiful but also pretty comfortable and easy to navigate and feel at ease in.

back in Germany & so back to the bread, oh goodness do I love kürbiskernbrot, not gonna say again that I prefer German bread on the whole to French bread but it would not be insane to prefer it simply on the basis of kürbiskernbrot...so lecker

Ich lieve beiden!

my favourite pumpkin seed breads are the little braided kürbiskernbrötchen because they have more surface area and more seeds. An excellent way to eat ham. I usually get Dinkelvollkornbrot (spelt) because it has a great moist but not too heavy texture and nutty taste. Standard brownish krustenbrot can be the best thing ever when it's really fresh. Turkish fladenbrot fulfils my occasional need for fluffy, sweet white stuff. Still, I miss the tandoor-oven naan bread places in Manchester.

I didnt vote in this poll, but would have voted Germany cuz i was born there. Also, beer.

this will be decided tonight by a friendly game of football

"wie viel Bier ist in der deutschen Intelligenz!"

xpost

vasco are there really v few tandoori restaurants in germany?

When I go see my family in Germany the things I most look forward to consuming are, without question, the pretzels. They get these huge soft perfect freshly baked pretzels from the bakery in town and they're to die for. Slap some butter on them and omgsogood.

Cheese vs. sausage
Wine vs. beer
Paris vs. Berlin
Alsace vs. Alsace
The Dreyfus Affair vs. The Reichstag Fire
Seine vs. Rhine
Rimbaud vs. Rilke

I could go on. But, if you ask other Europeans about German tourists vs. French tourists, I think the answer becomes clear.

viz. Germans are ok, as long as they stay at home in Germany.

Yeah but French people are assholes.

Yeah, all 60 million of them

Cheese vs. sausage
Wine vs. beer

My esteemed Aimless, this you've gotten partly wrong. The Franch may not make much good beer but they make excellent sausages and the Germans most certainly have excellent wines and cheeses

I was kidding! Mostly.

I really didn't want to buy into the whole "French people are rude" thing but as a whole I have found them to be pretty darn rude and unhelpful each time I've been there.

I think it's a question of etiquette. The French can be somehwat formal and they get rubbed the wrong way by people who don't treat them they way they're used to. Parisians, when rude, are mostly just much-hassled big city dwellers. I have never found the French any ruder than Germans as a whole.

that and cuz yr ancestors forced their ancestors to eat zebras and monkeys in 1871

and they still lost

That might very well be it! I was conscious of it though so tried to be as nice as possible. Maybe rude isn't the right word. I just never really got a very friendly feeling from them overall. I've only been there a handful of times so maybe I had bad luck.

lol xpost

there's a huge difference between parisians, who even french people hate, and french people outside of paris

and american tourists mostly deal w/ parisians

Interesting. I think that I've probably felt that more in Paris than in the other places I've been so you might be on to something.

other places in France, I mean

The French aren't very 'friendly' to strangers; they prefer their dignity and worry about encroaching on yours, which I rather prefer to the super friendly American tendency to buttonhole perfect strangers and then importune them while they writhe thinking of polite, 'nice' ways to escape.

They're also, by far, the most visited country on Earth.

yeah when you are living in the most visited tourist spot in the world you merit *a little bit* of impatience w/ fat american tourists in shorts

but really ime the rudeness towards tourists of parisians and new yorkers is both wayyy overstated

italians otoh, total assholes

Hamburgers imho are a little more restrained than Bavarians, too. The Viennese (if we're including Austrians in Germania) were always quite nice to me, though.

I pretty much try and grok local mores and behave accordingly to try and have the most fun.

I lived in Milan for about a year, cumulatively, and the locals can be annoying as heck but I also lived in a hood with lots of immigrants from the South and they were always really sweet to me.

I'm sure this comes from language barriers as much as anything, but I never really 'get' or enjoy German humor compared to French humor.

haha I 'get' french humor I just think it is generally pretty dumb

Really? I think the word-play can be pretty awesome.

ehh I am just not much for puns

The critic James Wood was delighted when he met Max to find him as quietly funny in person as in his writing:
‘“What is German humour like?” I asked him. “It is dreadful,” he said. “Have you seen any German comedy shows on television?” he asked. I had not. “They are simply indescribable,” he said, stretching the word in his lugubrious German accent. “Simply indescribable.”’

http://www.wgsebald.de/ABC.html

i liked the German tourists i've encountered. when i did my study abroad way back in the day and befriended a few, they were by far the most helpful. it seems like a lot of people dislike them b/c they are so lol German (i.e.: organized, research the locales very well so they knew the best nightspots and museums and where to get discounts).

that said, Parisian "unfriendliness" is largely a myth.

as for German humor -- i can't speak to that generally (though Kraftwerk could be funny). and this is pretty funny IMHO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKiAL0UeId4

I found the Parisians nice, but maybe I had low expectations? "Oh wow, the newsstand guy offered me a bag!"

I also had more than more than one experience of being randomly offered directions, sometimes to things my friends and I weren't even looking for.

shit i posted Bernie und Ert a year ago ... Schade ;_;