TIME EUROPE
June 12, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 23
Familiarity Breeds Contempt
Europe's old-fashioned forms of address offer a useful guide to human relations
By MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL
"Our problem is that we are intimate with everyone" — Wallace Stevens
In German, it's Du and Sie, in french, tu and vous, in Hungarian, te and š, in Italian, tu and lei, in Spanish tu and usted, and in Swahili — well, you get the point by now. And in English, the world's most treasured vernacular of familiars, it's simply: you and you. When I was a child growing up in a German-speaking household in a largely German-speaking neighborhood of New York, virtually everyone in my world — everyone either related to me or already deeply familiar — was a Du. I more or less came across my first Sie as an adult, when I started working as a producer for West German Television in Washington.
To most Americans, accustomed to spilling out their life story to the person seated beside them in row l8 of the New York-Washington, D.C. shuttle, these various permutations of you are a strange and Neanderthal institution. To the likes of television host Larry King, who talks to everyone from Hillary Clinton to the trainer of the latest talking chimp as if they had been twins separated at birth, they must seem like downright insults. But here in Europe, where familiarity is still thought of as something earned rather than assumed, this double form of personal address is considered perfectly natural.
Being an American and also a writer, who sometimes considers it a great inconvenience to have to juggle those discretionary yous, part of me has always felt it a burden to have to address, say, two people I am having a conversation with in two different ways. It taxes the brain sometimes, and the memory. What's more, being, as they say here where I live in Berlin, a locker (laid-back) kind of guy, all this Sie business — as did the š business while I was living in Hungary, and the vous business when I have visited France — often seems unnecessarily formal, class-based, stiff-necked, uptight.
But now, after years of living and working in Europe, I have come to appreciate the fact that all this differentiated youing contains a shorthand of its own, a way of identifying and naming what the poet Yeats called the heart-revealing intimacy/That chooses right. Along the sometimes vague boundaries of human relations, the difference between a tu and a vous, a Du and a Sie, or a te and an š can provide a subtle but accurate guide to when, and where, trespasses on fragile human privacies may be permitted, intimacies assumed, distances respected and maintained. These yous, in other words, are a kind of border guide to human relations, a barbed wire that doesn't wound, but merely reminds. And this system, I have come to realize, is not simply occasionally about class. It also, to an extent I have come increasingly to appreciate, has class.
Which is why, with each successive year away from the U.S. — and even with each successive year I'm back there — the voice, the face, the demeanor, the assumed familiarity of Larry King has seemed more and more offensive to this quasi-American expatriate. I have come, quite simply and directly, to abhor his ingratiating, I'm-your-best-friend-Larry smile. I have come to feel embarrassed by his buddy-buddy intrusions (repulsed, of course, by not one of his celebrity — and intimacy-starved — guests) on what, in Europe, would be matters too intimate, even, to discuss with many a Du. I have come to detest his assumptions of intimacy where distance should prevail, his questions about, say, a guest's weekly ejaculations where, in Europe, even a question about the person's table manners would be considered a bit too much.
There are, of course, benefits to our American laid-back-ness and ease of familiarity, as any European who's grown a bit tired of always differentiating between you and you, or of spending months knowing someone before they dare to ask whether they're left-or right-handed, will readily testify. Life's short, and so, sometimes, is the plane trip, so why — if the bloke happens to be sitting next to you anyway — not get to know him? But, on the cost side of the ledger, I hardly any longer know any Americans who've had even a few of the same friends for more than five years, though I know dozens who, having fallen wildly in love with some new you on the Boston-New York air shuttle, are busily filing for divorce just weeks later.
With all the quick-and-dirty, Larry King-style intimacies of the American way, I fear increasingly, love's labor — almost by definition, long, difficult, gradual and slow — can all too easily get lost in that rush to you-ness that this single syllable readily assumes. Which is why, were I ever invited to be on Mr. King's show (which, after having written this, you can be sure I will never be), I'd insist — even before the first commercial imploration to "reach out and touch someone" — that he refer to me as Sie.
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June 12, 2000
SPECIAL REPORT
French Connected
Despite a legacy of state control, and an archaic political leadership, France is thriving — and modernizing — in the face of global competition
EUROPE
The Victory Lap?
Europe toasts Clinton one more time, but the Atlantic relationship is showing strain
Battle of the Basques
Political inertia combines with disunity and distrust among Spain's national and regional security forces to play into the hands of the terrorist group ETA
Expensive Exposure
Hanover hopes Expo 2000 will put it on the map. It surely will, but the price of publicity will be high
Lights, Camera, Shoot!
Police disguised as a TV crew trick a man to free children and teachers held hostage in Luxembourg
AFRICA
Reliving Apartheid Horrors
The trial of a South African cardiologist accused of murder reopens old wounds
BUSINESS
Ad Land Goes Cyber
Virtual agencies are using the Web to create campaigns in record time, and without the bureaucracy
The Game of the Name
The struggle for Web dominance shows that brands matter just as much in the new economy as in the old
The Wide Blue Yonder
Giant airships could become commercially viable again six decades after the Hindenburg disaster
SOCIETY
Tangled Webs for Sale
Planning a tryst or a day at the races away from the boss? A Scottish firm can cover your tracks — for a fee
THE ARTS
Recreating a Jewel
Egypt has built an updated version of the fabled Bibliotheca Alexandrina, but its commitment to intellectual freedom remains an open question
Thandie Makes It Possible
Her mission: to help make M:I-2 the hottest movie of the season. But first she tells you about Hollywood stupidity (and Tom's unusual sense of humor)
The Daily Courage
Journalist Benjamin Pogrund let the facts speak for themselves, no easy task in apartheid South Africa
DEPARTMENTS
Essay
To Our Readers
World Watch
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