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Football fans: Sometimes misunderstandings and stereotypes shape relationships with Germans
Photo: Xinhua / imago images
What do Sebastian Vettel and Gianna Nanini have in common?
How do Rammstein and Umberto Eco fit together?
A dead writer, aging rock stars and a racing driver who is turning into the final straight of his career: Their names come to mind most often when people in Germany and Italy ask them about celebrities in the partner country.
Are German-Italian relations still stuck in the sound, in the discourse of past years or decades?
Answers are provided by »Fragile Friendship«, according to a current study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which SPIEGEL has exclusively received.
It examines what Germans and Italians think of each other - and comes just right after a year in which both countries have suffered from each other several times.
Many Italians felt abandoned at the beginning of the pandemic
At first, many Italians felt they had been left in the lurch at the beginning of the pandemic, when the federal government took notice of the disaster in northern Italy, seemingly unmoved, and rushed to help belatedly.
And then a number of German citizens, who remember well the anti-German and anti-European attacks by Matteo Salvini, struggled with the idea of raising a billion-dollar EU rescue package for Italy.
The money was going to the mafia anyway, it was said in a German newspaper comment - which even led to a diplomatic crisis: The federal government must distance itself from the "shameful tones", demanded Italy's foreign minister Luigi Di Maio.
Most recently, a review of the Italian national poet Dante, who died 700 years ago, in the “Frankfurter Rundschau” (“Shakespeare seems light years modern to us”) led to a scandal.
This time a state secretary for culture demanded an apology for the "unacceptable attack".
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Angela Merkel as a toy figure in Naples: Many Italians have great confidence in Germany
Photo: Stefano Montesi - Corbis / Corbis / Getty Images
In short: the mood is often irritable.
Both countries look back on decades of close relations, Germans and Italians actually know each other well.
72 percent of Germans have already been to Italy on vacation, and millions of Italians have worked in Germany since 1955.
People in both countries want close cooperation
The study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, which is based on a representative opinion poll from November 2020, basically gives the all-clear: The people in both countries, the study says, “would like Germany and Italy to work closely and well together in a strong EU. «But beyond this basic consensus, misunderstandings and stereotypes sometimes shape relationships, and self-perception and perception of the outside world often diverge.
Italians are much more optimistic about the
economic situation in the Federal Republic
than the Germans themselves:
62 percent of Italians think Germany's economic situation is good or very good - among German citizens it is only 44 percent.
Conversely, 58 percent find their own economic prospects bad or very bad (among Germans, 46 percent expect Italy to develop negatively).
There are also different perspectives when
looking at Europe
:
Only 29 percent of Italians see advantages for their country in EU membership, and only 24 percent see the euro as positive.
Far more Germans, on the other hand, believe that Italy will benefit from EU membership and the euro (51 percent and 44 percent).
"Respondents from both countries tend to see their own country at a disadvantage and are of the opinion that the other country is more likely to benefit from EU membership than their own," is the conclusion of the study.
"Italians think Germany is more influential than the Germans themselves"
The same applies to the question of who has more to say in Brussels: "Italians consider Germany to be more influential than the Germans themselves," says the study, "and the German respondents, on the other hand, consider Italy to be more influential than the Italians themselves."
The
EU criticism
, which is
more widespread in Italy
, does not lead to thoughts of separation:
68 percent of citizens would vote in a referendum for Italy to remain in the EU,
63 percent want to keep the euro (in Germany 76 and 71 percent are for German EU and euro membership).
And although only 29 percent of Germans have great or very great confidence in Italy, at the time of the survey they were surprisingly magnanimous on a central question: 56 percent of them were in favor of the EU reconstruction fund, which is financed by all EU countries and will support the reconstruction of Italy with more than 200 billion euros.
Only 36 percent of the people in Italy have confidence in their own country
This and other subject areas reveal very different moods in the two countries.
Germans were quite satisfied with themselves and their country at the time of the survey, while people in Italy were more likely to question themselves and their country:
Only 36 percent of them have great or very great
confidence in their own country
,
while 79 percent of them have great or very great confidence in Germany.
One can learn from Germany, but not from Italy, is the general mood in both countries.
"A Germany with robust self-confidence," says the study, "faces a significantly more skeptical and self-critical Italy."
When it comes to "the Germans" and "the Italians", old stereotypes often play a role;
The perception of oneself and that of others can also differ significantly in this area.
But there are also surprising changes in perspective
Germans consider themselves to be
accurate (91%)
,
hardworking
(78%)
,
profound (53%)
and
fixed on the rules (45%)
,
while Italians see the same characteristics as much less pronounced in the Federal Republic.
They find the Germans significantly less
accurate
(42%)
,
hardworking
(49%)
,
profound (37%)
and
fixed on the rules (25%)
.
Does it have something to do with the fact that Italians often experience Germans as vacationers?
Around 90 percent of them even find Germans cheerful, flexible, optimistic and creative.
When looking at Italy there are also different perspectives: people in Italy consider themselves to be
accurate (85%)
and modern
(73%)
, while Germans only want to recognize these characteristics there in 29 and 21%.
"In the eyes of the Italians, Germany is primarily the land of work, discipline and efficiency," says Tobias Mörschel, head of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Italy, while Italy, from the perspective of the Germans, is "above all the land of good weather, food and the Joie de vivre «.
After all, everyone agrees on one point: the vast majority of people in Germany and Italy consider themselves and the citizens in the partner country to be cheerful.