German Road Rage

German road rage is different than American road rage. Germans are not generally allowed to carry weapons here, for instance. And this is definitely a good thing. This is a good thing because aggressive and angry behavior by a driver of a motor vehicle here in Germany, this to include rude gestures, verbal insults, threats and even physical assault is the rule here, not the exception. Having guns would only make the situation more complicated. Or less complicated, depending upon how you choose to look at it.

Aggressive driving is normal here, in other words. Everybody does it. And I am convinced that you will never find a clearer cut case of that fictional Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomenon than right here in good old real-life Germany. Behind any randomly selected set of white knuckles clinching desperately to a randomly selected German steering wheel sits a seething cauldron of rage just waiting to explode. Religious do-gooders, pacifists, off-duty policemen, little-old-lady types, you name it, they all go berserk here once you give them a set of car keys. And the pent-up aggression is palpable once they get behind the wheel. They are out to set something straight, something imponderable for the rest of us. They have a mission. They are Michael Douglas in Falling Down. They are looking for a fight.

They have not so much entered the Twilight Zone as their own private Wild West. And I've seen Wild West standoffs here on more than one occasion, let me tell you. And they are not always just about parking spaces either.

Just the other day I got to watch one from my balcony. Two drivers, men (men drivers are more aggressive than the women are, just in case you were wondering), one in a Jaguar and the other in a Golf, were facing each other off in the street in front of my apartment house. These streets can be awfully narrow sometimes and it often comes to "incidents" like these. It's similar to when two cars are trying to cross a one-lane bridge at the same time. Somebody either has to give in and wait or back up and let the other guy through. Neither of these guys were even thinking about budging an inch here, though. They had already turned off their engines and had been facing each other off, bumper to bumper, for a good ten minutes. I went back into the kitchen to grab my Kaffee and came back to watch some more. Other cars would drive in behind them every few minutes, honk like crazy for awhile and then give up, get verbally abusive, back up and leave. I counted seven or eight of them. These guys didn't seem to be in any hurry, though, and the cops never showed up. Then I got bored and went back to my newspaper in the kitchen. I found out later that the guy in the Jaguar finally knuckled under and backed out. Noblesse oblige or something, I guess.

Germans often go crazy like this, wenn sie Recht haben (when they are right, or believe themselves to be right - in the legal sense). It doesn't really matter that they may be wrong in the moral or common sense way. They are often blind to this. Blind is the right word, too, like being color blind. Being right legally - like having the right of way, for instance - that's all that matters here in conflicts like this.

Germans like to yell and holler a lot while driving too, like cowpokes herding cattle. They honk at everything that gets in their way. I've even seen them speed up when they see pedestrians crossing the street in front of them instead of waiting for them to pass (this is apparently a sign of disrespect).

And then there is that problem with speed here. Germans have a need for speed. That's why they build race cars. That's why even proposing something like a general speed limit on German autobahns is political suicide here, even though, practically speaking, the sections of the autobahn without a speed limit are actually few and far between. Bringing up the subject of tougher speed limits in Germany is a lot like suggesting more stringent gun control in the United States. A polarizing issue par excellence, speedy German drivers react almost as emotionally to the first suggestion as heavily-armed American gun fans do to the second. It doesn't really matter if it might make sense or not, it is a subject that is emotional geladen (emotionally charged, as in loaded, as in gun) and therefore an easy one to have blow up in your face. Germans seem to view their freedom to speed on the autobahn as their final frontier for a little freedom in an otherwise overly-regulated country.

So where does all this aggression come from? I haven't the slightest idea. One theory goes like this: Once Germans find themselves behind all of that steel and glass and airbag material, they actually believe themselves to be invisible. I think they might really believe this. Normally quite inhibited and repressed, no one can recognize them in their car anymore so they take this golden opportunity to go completely ape. They are now anonymous and are no longer responsible for their actions. They are, in a word, free. And that's when all of this pent-up aggression breaks through and they start howling and frothing around the mouth.

Although, to be perfectly honest, I've only seen froth around the mouth on two occasions.

Fortsetzung folgt (to be continued).

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Originally from California's Central San Joaquin Valley and washed ashore on the coast of old West Berlin, Charles Larson is a freelance writer well versed in German and German culture. For more info, feel free to visit his website at EnglishPro & Co.