Germany has lost quite a bit of its hard-won reputation for beneficence in the past few weeks. Thanks to Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble’s tough position in the Greek debt negotiations, the whole country is now back to being seen like a land of intransigent, hard, merciless people.
No one knows this better than the Germans themselves, and many of them are openly voicing their disagreement with their country’s official policies. Some of them are doing so through satire—also helping dispel the myth that Germans aren’t funny.
In Unsere Schönen Deutschen Euros (Our Precious German Euros), two men enjoying the comfort of luxury rooms complain about Greece on the phone, using rather trite stereotypes and offensive expressions that have been published in the German press (the name and date of the publications is superimposed in the video):
Die Anstalt, a satirical show, had a whole 50-minute episode entitled Griechenland (Greece) poking harsh fun at Germany’s behavior toward the struggling nation. In the opening, Zeus appears to the Troika (“We are the Troika. We are gods. But you may as well call us institutions”), who has decided Greece can no longer afford Mount Olympus (where Zeus is mythologically housed).
The musical video V for Varoufakis is, instead, about the brave, fearless Germans dealing with a new scary enemy: the man who “puts the hell in Hellenic,” Greece’s former finance minister. A man whose leather jacket is made of the skin of German shepherds’ puppies and who doesn’t negotiate, “he simply kicks ass:”